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Macmillan's English Classics 



A SERIES OF ENGLISH TEXTS EDITED FOR 

USE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS, WITH 

CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS, 

NOTES, ETC. 



16mo. 



Flexible 



25c. each 



Macaulay's Essay on Addison 
Macaulay's Essay on Milton 
Tennyson's The Princess 
Eliot's Silas Marner 
Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner 
Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans 
Burke s Speech on Conciliation 
Pope's Homer's Iliad 
Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield 
Shakespeare's Macbeth 
Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley 
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice 



OTHERS TO FOLLOW 



\ 



COLERIDGE'S 

ANCIENT MARINER, KUBLA KHAN 
AND CHRISTABEL 



■&&>&. 



COLERIDGE'S 

ANCIENT MAEINER, KUBLA KHAN 
AND CHRISTABEL 

EDITED WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION 

by y 

TULEY FKANCIS HUNTINGTON 

A.M. (Harvard) 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN THE SOUTH SIDE HIGH SCHOOL, 
MILWAUKEE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1899 

All rights reserrsd 



20880 



Copyright, 189S, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



53 

&d8 



NovtoootJ ^rrss 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






&9i 



PREFACE 

By putting into this little volume the Ancient 
Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel, I have thought 
to make easily accessible to students of secondary 
schools the perfect flower of Coleridge's poetical 
genius. Nowhere else, I believe, could there be found 
three poems whose study, if properly directed, would 
be more likely to lead to an appreciation of the sweet- 
ness and loveliness of poetry, and to overcome that 
spirit of materialism for which we Americans have 
been so much criticised. 

In the Introduction I have tried to give an impres- 
sion of Coleridge's place in English literature, and to 
interest the student in his life and work in such a 
way as to promote further reading, not only in what 
Coleridge himself wrote, but also in what his contem- 
poraries wrote. The Notes have been selected from a 
great amount of material gathered from widely scat- 
tered sources, nothing having been allowed to stand 
which did not seem either actually to elucidate the text 
or to help in the appreciation of some matter that stu- 



IV PREFACE 

dents more or less new to the study of poetry might 
otherwise pass over without notice. Everywhere the 
aim has been to stimulate, rather than to supersede, 
thought. The numerous references given throughout 
the book are intended to aid the teacher in bringing 
to his class additional material ; for, although the 
Ancient Mariner is included in the " reading list " of 
the English requirements for entrance to college, there 
is every reason why the poem should be carefully 
studied. The mere reading of the poem, in fact, will 
reveal to the ordinary student very little of the wealth 
of imagination with which it is pervaded. 

The text here given is, with a very few slight 
changes made to make the punctuation and typogra- 
phy more consistent and attractive, that of 1829, the 
last to be issued under the personal supervision of 
the poet. The mark °, which appears in the text, 
indicates a note. The portrait of Coleridge which 
forms the frontispiece of this volume is from the 
painting (1795) by Peter Vandyke, and was said by 
Cottle to exhibit the poet " in one of his animated 
conversations, the expression of which the painter has 
in good degree preserved." 

T. F. H. 

Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 22, 1898. 



INTRODUCTION 



I. COLERIDGE'S LIFE AND WORKS 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thir- 
teen children, was born at Ottery, Devonshire, Eng- 
land, October 21, 1772. In the eccentricities of his 
father, the simple-hearted preacher and pedagogue of 
Ottery St. Mary, can be traced the origin of some 
of the peculiarities of the poet. The former was the 
author of several books, among which was A Critical 
Latin Grammar. In this work he proposed several 
innovations, one of which was to substitute for the 
ordinary names of the cases such terms as " prior, 
possessive, attributive, posterior, interjective, and 
quale-quare-quidditive." " The truth is," Coleridge 
once wrote, " my father was not a first-rate genius ; 
he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much 
better. ... In learning, good-heartedness, absentness 
of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a 
perfect Parson Adams." 1 Of the poet's mother we 

1 Letter to Poole. Works (Shedd), Vol. III., p. 602. 
V 



VI INTR OD UC TION 

know much less. She seems to have been a very 
ordinary woman, ardently devoted to her household 
duties, out of all sympathy with " your harpsichord 
ladies," as unemotional and unimaginative as she was 
uneducated, and withal a very Martha in her ex- 
quisite care in the trifles of life. 

The little poet was much petted by both his father 
and mother — a fact that brought him the dislike of 
the other children and made him very miserable. He 
therefore took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read 
incessantly. " I read through all gilt-cover little books 
that could be had at that time, and likewise all the 
uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant- 
Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall 
and mope, and my spirits used to come upon me sud- 
denly and in a flood ; and then I was accustomed to 
run up and down the churchyard, and act over again 
all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and 
the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to 
have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip 
Quarles (Quarll) ; and then I found the Arabian 
Nights' Entertainments, one tale of which . . . made 
so deep an impression on me . . . that I was haunted 
by spectres whenever I was in the dark; and I dis- 
tinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness 
with which I used to watch the window where the 
book lay, and when the sun came upon it I would 



INTRODUCTION Vll 

seize it, carry it by the Avail, and bask, and read. My 
father found out the effect which these books had 
produced, and burned them. So I became a dreamer, 
and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity ; 
I was fretful, and inordinately passionate ; . . . de- 
spised and hated by the boys; . . . nattered and won- 
dered at by all the old women. . . . and before I was 
eight years old I was a character." 1 

Thus, even during his childhood, his thoughts, his 
habits, as well as his language, were unlike those of 
the ordinary boy. Late in 1781 his father died, and 
the following year the boy was transferred from the 
Grammar School, where he had gone from a Dame's 
School, and had easily outstripped all of his own age, 
to Christ's Hospital, the great Charity School of Lon- 
don — an establishment where excellent instruction 
was to be had, but where the diet and discipline were 
of the sort found at the notorious Mr. Squeers's Dothe- 
boys Hall. Here, among six or seven hundred blue- 
coated lads, pent up in dim cloisters in the heart of 
a great city, and seeing nothing lovely but the sky 
and stars, 2 the boy lived a long exile of eight years. 
" My talents and superiority," he said, " made me for- 
ever at the head in my routine of study, though 
utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark 

i Letter to Poole. Works, Vol. III., pp. 605-606. 
2 See Frost at Midnight. 



Vlll INTRODUCTION 

of ambition ; and as to emulation, it had no meaning 
for me ; but the difference between me and my form- 
fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no propor- 
tion to the measureless difference between me and 
them in the wide, wild wilderness of useless, unar- 
ranged book knowledge and book thoughts." 1 In a 
similar strain wrote Charles Lamb, his schoolfellow 
and lifelong friend : " Come back into memory, like as 
thou wert in the day spring of thy fancies, with hope 
like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar 
not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, 
Metaphysician, Bard ! — How have I seen the casual 
passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with 
admiration (while he Vv r eighed the disproportion be- 
tween the speech and the garb of the young Miran- 
dula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet 
intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus 
(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at 
such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his 
Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey 
Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired 
charity-boy ! " 2 

The visionary propensities of the inspired charity- 
boy, however, were in direct contrast to the sound 
common sense of the head-master of the school — the 

i Works, Vol. III., p. 613. 

2 Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago. 



INTRODUCTION IX 

Reverend Mr. James Boyer. The savage floggings 
inflicted by the latter furnished the dreams of even 
the mature manhood of the poet with spectres as 
awful, we may suppose, as any that had haunted the 
distempered sleep of his childhood. One of these 
floggings, Coleridge said, was just. He had taken a 
notion of being apprenticed to a shoemaker, but when 
the matter was brought to the irate schoolmaster the 
boy was knocked down, and the shoemaker jostled 
out of the room. Upon being asked by Boyer why he 
had made such a fool of himself, Coleridge replied 
that he hated the thought of becoming a clergyman — 
as it was then intended he should. " Why so ? " said 
Boyer. " Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said the 
boy, " I am an infidel ! " " So, sirrah, you are an infi- 
del, are you? Then I'll flog your infidelity out of 
you ! " And without more ado he proceeded to con- 
vert the young sceptic by means of the birch. 1 Nev- 
ertheless, "this horrid incarnation of whips and 
scourges," as DeQuincey once characterized him, was 
a teacher of marked individuality, and a man whose 
influence proved to be a needful check upon the way- 
ward fancy of the youthful poet. In his Biographia 
Literaria (Chap. I.) Coleridge pays a deserved tribute 
to his master: "He early moulded my taste to the 

i Table-Talk, May 27, 1830; Gillman's Life of Coleridge, Vol. I., 
pp. 21, 23. 



X INTRODUCTIOX 

preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and 
Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. . . . 
At the same time that we were studying the Greek 
tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton 
as lessons ; and they were the lessons, too, which 
required most time and trouble to bring iq>, so as to 
escape his censure. I learnt from him that poetry, 
even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the 
wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that 
of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, 
more complex, and dependent on more and more 
fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would 
say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every 
word, but for the position of every word." 

To Coleridge's aversion to boyish pastimes there 
was at this time at least one exception. On one occa- 
sion we hear of the lad swimming across the New 
River without undressing, and letting his clothes dry 
on his back, with the inevitable consequence to his 
health. At another time, oblivious to all about him, 
the boy was going down the crowded Strand, with his 
arms tossing about in an imaginary sea. A stranger, 
with whose pocket his hand happened to come in 
contact, promptly seized him and accused him of an 
attempt to pick his pocket. " What ! so young and 
so wicked ? " he exclaimed. Whereupon the fright- 
ened boy sobbed out his denial, and explained that he 



INTRODUCTION XI 

thought himself Leander swimming across the Helles- 
pont. The astonished stranger was so impressed with 
this apology that he at once paid Coleridge's subscrip- 
tion to a circulating library, 1 which the lonely lad pro- 
ceeded to read, straight through, folios and all, whether 
he understood them or not, at the rate of two volumes 
a day. At times his reading took odd turns. One 
while we find him reading all the medical and surgical 
books he could get hold of ; another, bewildering him- 
self in metaphysics, when history, novels and romances, 
and even poetry, became insipid to him. It was while 
plunged head over ears in metaphysic depths that he 
was presented with a booklet containing the Sonnets 
of Mr. Bowles. These poems so delighted him that 
in less than a year and a half he made forty tran- 
scriptions as presents for his friends. To Coleridge 
these sonnets were a revelation, because in both form 
and matter they were characterized by a naturalness 
which was wholly wanting in the artificial poetry of 
the school of Pope, — a style which was then uni- 
versally admired. The same qualities, it is true, had 
made themselves felt to even a greater degree in the 
poems of Blake, Cowper, and Burns, but of these 
poets Coleridge at that time knew nothing. In his 
championship of this new poetry Coleridge found him- 

1 Gillmau's Life of Coleridge, p. 17. 



Xll INTRODUCTION 

self obliged to lay a solid foundation upon which to 
rear the principles of his taste and critical opinion, a 
discipline which later developed him into the greatest 
philosophic critic England has ever produced. 

It need not surprise one, then, that when Coleridge 
in 1791 entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, he pres- 
ently became a centre of attraction. One of his col- 
lege mates says that for the sake of listening to 
Coleridge's brilliant conversation his room became 
a constant rendezvous of his undergraduate friends. 
Here they gave themselves up to enjoyment. Mschy- 
lus and Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside, and 
the time was devoted by the young enthusiasts to the 
discussion of poetry and philosophy, religion and poli- 
tics. If a political pamphlet had issued from the press 
in the morning, at evening Coleridge would repeat 
whole pages verbatim to his wondering audience. And 
there were burning questions to be decided. France 
was in the throes of revolution, and all Europe stood 
in breathless expectation awaiting the outcome. The 
most monstrous crimes had not yet been committed 
in the name of Liberty, and Hope could look beyond 
the smoke and bloodshed of the battlefield to a time 
when the last vestige of despotism should be swept 
away, could behold Law and Justice arrayed in the 
purple of authority and seated upon the world's throne. 
Wrought up over these and kindred speculations it was 



IN TR 01) UCTIOX xii 1 

not strange that a young man of Coleridge's ability 
should grow weary of the patient labor required to 
win honors as a student. He had come to the Uni- 
versity excellently prepared in all except mathematics 
and the sciences, both of which he had from the out- 
set detested, and in his first year, by gaining a gold 
medal for a Greek Ode, had given promise of winning 
a reputation for academic scholarship. But his inter- 
est in his work waned, his reading grew more and 
more desultory, until, just after beginning his third 
year, whether from debts, or disappointed love, or 
boih, he suddenly quitted Cambridge for London. 
Here, having spent the little money he had taken 
with him, and at a loss to know what to do next, he 
enlisted in a regiment of dragoons as Silas Tomkyn 
Comberbach, a name which he afterwards remarked 
was aptly suggestive of his habits as an equestrian. 
But a Latin lament which he had penciled on his stall 
betrayed him, and the discharge which his friends soon 
procured came as a welcome relief from a service for 
which he Avas but poorly adapted. He lost no time 
in returning to his Alma Mater, where his escapade 
was closed by his being admonished by the Masters 
in the presence of the Fellows. He continued at 
Cambridge until about the middle of December, 1794, 
when he left the University without taking a degree. 
Some six months before leaving the University he 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

had formed the acquaintance of Southey, then an 
undergraduate of Oxford and afterwards the poet- 
laureate of England. As each at once recognized the 
other's genius, and as both had much in common, the 
acquaintance fast ripened into an intimate friendship. 
Together with some other kindred spirits, they hatched 
the scheme of Pantisocracy. They were to migrate to 
some unsettled region in America — the Susquehanna 
was selected, largely on account of its sweet-sounding 
name, where the labor of two or three hours each day 
would supply the needs of the body, and the ample 
leisure devoted to study and discussion, those of the 
mind. Poetry was to be written, property was to be 
possessed in common, their wives were to divide their 
time between the duties of the home and the cultiva- 
tion of their minds, all were to believe as they wished 
in religion and politics, and there was to be no selfish- 
ness and no sin. But money was wanting to put the 
project into execution, the enthusiasm of some of the 
poet-emigrants cooled, and the whole dream vanished 
into thin air. Other and more absorbing interests 
soon occupied them, for Southey and Coleridge fell 
in love with, and married, two sisters. The marriage 
of Sarah Fricker to Coleridge occurred October 4, 1795, 
and that of Edith to Southey took place a month later. 
Thus it happened that Coleridge was saved from 
Pantisocracy only to be plunged into the severest 



INTRODUCTION XV 

sort of a struggle for the means of subsistence. To 
begin with, he had no income except the promise of a 
publisher to pay a guinea and a half per hundred lines 
of whatever poetry he might produce. But he soon 
discovered that Poetry does not wait on the beck and 
nod of the task-masters, Bread and Butter, and he was 
therefore obliged to resort to other devices to earn a 
livelihood. While seeing through the press his Poems 
on Various Subjects, — a volume whose publication 
attracted some favorable attention from the reviews 
and magazines, but which was delayed until early in 
1796 by his failure to hasten the completion of his 
Religious Musings, he wrote for TJie Morning Chronicle 
and The Critical Review. He also began the publica- 
tion of The Watchman, 1 a miscellany half-way between 
the newspaper and the magazine. But after the peri- 
odical had dragged on for over a year, it was given up 
because it failed to pay expenses. Lecturing he had 
already tried, and he now thought to ht himself for 
the pulpit, but without avail. Added to this, his 
wife and he were not able either to understand or to 
appreciate one another. "Never, I suppose," he once 
wrote, " did the stern match-maker bring together two 
minds so utterly contrarient in their primary and or- 
ganical constitution." 2 He himself was in poor health, 

1 See Biographia Literaria, Chap. X., for an amusing account of 
his canvass for subscribers. 2 Letter to Southey. 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

and, in an hour to be cursed throughout his whole 
life, resorted to opium to relieve his pain. But by 
gifts of money from friends, and by advances from 
his publishers on future literary work, he managed 
to live from hand to mouth until an arrangement by 
which a young man of some literary pretensions was 
settled at his home for a time bettered his financial 
affairs. 

In the fall of 1796 Coleridge met Wordsworth, and 
began the intercourse whose influence upon the careers 
of the two poets and upon the history of English 
poetry can scarcely be overestimated. It would be 
difficult to imagine two men having so much in com- 
mon and living outward and inward lives so dissimi- 
lar. But if the lofty mind of Wordsworth be set over 
against the profound intellect of Coleridge, if his long 
years filled with hopeful activity present a striking 
contrast to Coleridge's shorter struggle saddened by 
many disheartening failures, if Wordsworth's single- 
ness of purpose in the pursuit of poetry be more 
admired than Coleridge's vacillating waywardness in 
attempting scores of plans without pursuing them to 
their perfect fulfilment, there were yet many points 
at which the genius of these men met. They w T ere 
the most powerful and original of all the spirits that 
sprang from the ashes of eighteenth-century conven- 
tionalism, and it may be truthfully said that the best 



INTRODUCTION xvil 

of what was thought and said at the beginning of the 
present century in England had its inspiration in them 
and was spiritualized by them. It is hardly an exag- 
geration to say that we measure the worth of their 
contemporaries by the extent to which they were influ- 
enced by the principles promulgated by Coleridge and 
Wordsworth. 

But however that may be, it is certain that each 
poet possessed the very qualities needed to bring out 
what was best in the other, and, as a result of this 
stimulating intimacy, Coleridge wrote most of the 
poetry for which he is now remembered, and Words- 
worth much of his, during the period in which the 
two were almost constant companions. It was now 
that Coleridge wrote, in addition to the three poems 
contained in the present volume, any one of which 
would have been sufficient to have immortalized him, 
the Ode on the Departing Year, The Three Graves (in 
part), France : an Ode, Frost at Midnight, Fears in 
Solitude, The Ballad of the Dark Ladie, and the tra- 
gedy Osorio, besides many other poems of less worth. 
This, indeed, was the blossoming time of his poetic 
genius. 

Here was conceived, too, the theory of poetry which 
led to the publication of the Lyrical Bcdlads, a book 
that marked the beginning of a new epoch in the 
history of English poetry. " During the first year 



XV111 INTRODUCTION 

that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours," says 
Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (Chap. XIV.), 
" our conversations turned frequently on the two car- 
dinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sym- 
pathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the 
truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest 
of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. 
The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, 
which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and 
familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practica- 
bility of combining both. These are the poetry of 
nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us 
I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be 
composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and 
agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural ; and 
the excellence aimed at was to consist in the inter- 
esting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such 
emotions, as would naturally accompany such situa- 
tions, supposing them real. And real in this sense 
they have been to every human being who, from what- 
ever source of delusion, has at any time believed him- 
self under supernatural agency. For the second class, 
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life ; the 
characters and incidents were to be such as will be 
found in every village and its vicinity where there is 
a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or 
to notice them when they present themselves. 



INTRODUCTION xix 

" In this idea originated the plan of the ' Lyrical 
Ballads ' ; in which it was agreed that, my endeavours 
should be directed to persons and characters super- 
natural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer 
from our inward nature a human interest and a sem- 
blance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows 
of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for 
the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 1 Mr. 
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to 
himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty 
to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analo- 
gous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's 
attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing 
it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world 
before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, 
in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish 
solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear 
not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand." 

To this volume, which was published anonymously 
in 1798, Coleridge contributed the Ancient Mariner and. 
three other poems, and Wordsworth no less than nine- 
teen poems. The poets had written ahead of their time, 
and the reception accorded the book was anything but 
cordial. Small indeed was the number of those who 
did not either entirely ignore it or make it the butt of 
their ridicule. But year by year, as the taste of the 
1 See Lectures and Notes on Shakspere (Bohn ed.), p. 139. 



XX INTRODUCTION 

public came more and more into harmony with the 
spirit of the book, the latter steadily grew in favor, 
until at last its influence upon the life and thought of 
the time began to be appreciated. 

Before the publication of this book Coleridge had 
been freed from any solicitude as to a livelihood by a 
pension of £150 a year, 1 given him by two rich men 
on the condition that he should devote himself entirely 
to the study of poetry and philosophy. This' enabled 
him, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, 
Dorothy Wordsworth, to visit Germany in September, 
1798, where he remained until the following June. It 
was to this period of his life that Coleridge always 
looked back with most satisfaction. During his stay 
on the continent he became thoroughly proficient in 
the language, literature, and genius of the German 
people, having felt in particular the influence of Les- 
sing, in criticism, and of Kant, in metaphysics. He 
was thus enabled, later on, followed in turn by Carlyle, 
to make German thought influence the intellectual life 
of England. The direct outcome of his tour, however, 
was, in addition to Satyrane's Letters, admirable in 
their way, a translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, 2 
which remains one of the most notable translations 
of poetry into poetry in any literature, since in this 

1 Half of this pension was withdrawn in 1S12. 

2 The first part, Wallenstein's Lager, was omitted. 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

work Coleridge not only preserved the spirit of his 
original, but in many places improved upon it. 

The years following Coleridge's return from Ger- 
many down to 1816, when he placed himself under 
the care of Mr. Gillman at Highgate, can be hastily 
epitomized. For the most part, the life he now led 
was a nomadic one, — he pitched his tent wherever 
evening fell upon him. Like his old seafarer, the 
Ancient Mariner, he passed like night from place to 
place, with nothing save his strange power of speech 
to win him welcome. When not at home, he might be 
found with Wordsworth at Grasmere, with Poole at 
Stowey, or, perhaps, with Lamb at London. On one 
occasion he made a tour through South Wales ; en 
another he went with Wordsworth and his sister into 
Scotland. He made several short stays in London, 
and, in 1804, even went to Malta, visiting Rome and 
Naples on his way back to England, which he reached 
after an absence of two years. He did not at once re- 
turn home, and when he did it was not long before he 
and Mrs. Coleridge agreed to separate. Other troubles 
began to press him down. In spite of his annuity, 
he was again in narrow straits for money, and was 
forced once more to depend upon gifts and loans from 
his friends and advances from his publishers. He 
was also in wretched health, and, to make matters 
worse, he had allowed opium to cloud and benumb his 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

intellect and will. Under such circumstances it is not 
surprising that the spirit of his great genius lay grovel- 
ling in a mire of hopeless despondency. 

During this whole period Coleridge produced only 
some half-dozen poems that are worthy of mention, 
and even these are not of the highest order, — that 
is to say, they do not rank with those written during 
what may be called his annus mirabilis (1797-1798). 
Of these, Dejection : an Ode, Hymn before /Sun-Hise, 
The Pains of Sleep, and a Tombless Epitaph 1 are the 
finest. But he worked over his Osorio, now christened 
Remorse, which had a run of twenty nights at Drury 
Lane and brought him more money than he had got 
from all his previous literary labors. It may be said 
that Coleridge went to Germany a poet and returned 
a philosopher. At any rate, from the time he returned 
the decline of his poetical power went steadily on. 
Whether it was due to the dismal reign of the Opium 
King or to the preponderance of the critical, or of the 
reflective, over the creative faculty, we can only con- 
jecture. Of this decline Coleridge himself was fully 
conscious, for in his lines To a Gentleman, written 
shortly after his return from Malta, he writes sadly of a 

" Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, 
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain. 1 ' 

1 Pater has applied lines 14-37 to Coleridge himself. 



INTRODUCTION xxm 

And his Dejection : an Ode is another cry from the 
depths : 

" There was a time when, though my path was rough, 

This joy within me dallied with distress, 
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff 

Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness : 
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, 
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. 
But now afflictions bow me down to earth : 
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ; 

But oh ! each visitation 
Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth, 

My shaping spirit of Imagination." 

Perhaps the all-wise Future may show that he bene- 
fited man as much by his metaphysics, as if he had 
written other Christabels and other Ancient Mariners. 
We cannot tell. But we know that after the light of his 
imagination nickered into darkness, there w r as no Pro- 
methean heat that could relume it. When he had once 
plucked the rose, there was no power that could give 
it vital growth again, — it must needs wither away on 
its stalk. If he had been a Homer or a Shakspere, 
the "years that bring the philosophic mind" would 
have given his poetic powers renewed vigor; but, 
then, there has been but one Shakspere and one 
Homer. As it was, enough of his creative faculty 
remained to make him a keener critic and a more 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

penetrative philosopher than he would otherwise have 
been ; and England needed both. 

But while Coleridge did not at this time write much 
poetry, it must not be supposed that he had no other 
pursuits to occupy his time. He was a journalist and 
a lecturer. In the former capacity he wrote off and 
on for The Morning Post and The Courier, and edited 
on his own account a paper called The Friend. The 
latter was no more successful from a financial stand- 
point than his ci-devant Watchman, and was soon aban- 
doned. Regarding his lectures, of which the larger 
portion was devoted to Shakspere, there are conflict- 
ing reports. It would seem that he sometimes kept 
his audience waiting long after the hour appointed for 
the lecture to begin ; that at times he did not appear 
at all ; that he not seldom made promises as to future 
lectures which he did not fulfil, and, in spite of his own 
statement to the contrary, that he rarely gave to his 
lectures the careful preparation ordinarily deemed 
requisite. But if this be so, it is no less certain that 
he spoke on subjects to which he had devoted almost 
a lifetime of deliberation, that he was often at his best 
when unhampered by a written manuscript and when 
borne on by the mighty current of his impassioned 
thought. Then, too, we know from the meagre re- 
mains of his lectures that no finer criticism had been 
heard in England than that which fell from his lips. 






INTRODUCTION xxv 

At Highgate, Coleridge tried to free himself from 
his slavery to opium, and to some extent succeeded. 
Of the few poems he wrote in the last years of his life, 
the exquisite Youth and Age and Work without Hope are 
the best. In 1816 he published a volume containing 
Christabel, Kubla Khan, and Pains of Sleep, but it met 
with a disappointing reception from the reviews. In 
the following year appeared Sibylline Leaves, — a col- 
lection of most of his poetical compositions up to that 
time, — and this was followed by other editions of his 
poems in 1828, 1829, and 1831. In 1817, Zapolya, 
another drama, a kind of composition for which Cole- 
ridge never showed much talent, was published. The 
list of his most important prose works issued before 
his death comprises two Lay Sermons 1816, 1817, 
Biographia Literaria 1817, and Aids to Reflection 1825; 
and after his death, Table-Talk 1835, Literary Remains 
1836-1838, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit 1840, 
Lectures on Shakspere (from notes by J. P. Collier) 
1875, Letters of S. T. Coleridge 1895, and Aninia Poetce 
1895. 1 

But in spite of the fact that Coleridge was obliged 
to toil on at a time when most men expect to rest from 
their labors, there was more repose in his life at High- 
gate than he had formerly enjoyed. In 1825 he was 

1 My review of this work will be found in The Dial, Nov. 1, 

is<:>. 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

granted an annuity of 100 guineas by the king, which 
was made up to him elsewhere when it ceased soon 
after the king's death in 1830. " It is not secret," 
writes Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography (Chap. XVI.) 
" that Coleridge lived in the Grove at Highgate with a 
friendly family, who had sense and kindness enough 
to know that they did themselves honor by looking 
after the comforts of such a man. His room looked 
upon a delicious prospect of wood and meadow, with 
colored gardens under the window, like an embroidery 
to the mantle. I thought, when I first saw it, that he 
had taken up his dwelling-place like an abbot. Here 
he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for 
his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He 
might have been seen taking his daily stroll up and 
down, with his black coat and white locks, and a book 
in his hand ; and was a great acquaintance of the little 
children. His main occupation, I believe, was reading. 
He loved to read old folios, and to make old voyages 
with Furchas and Marco Polo — the seas being in good 
visionary condition and the vessel well stocked with 
botargoes." 

And now there had fallen on Coleridge the mantle 
of Dr. Johnson, the great talker of the preceding cen- 
tury. Each of these men was the most extraordinary 
talker of his time, but with this difference : Johnson's 
talk depended upon his apt rejoinders ; Coleridge's, 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

upon the majestic flow of his marvellous monologue. 
Johnson, in short, was colloquial, while Coleridge was 
alloquial. It may be said that Coleridge's reputation 
as a talker rests upon two things, — the printed record 
of what he said, and the witness of those who heard 
him to the impression produced upon them. Unfor- 
tunately there was no Boswell living in Coleridge's 
time, and the most of what he said was not perma- 
nently recorded, but some conception of the depth and 
variety of thought in these discourses may be had from 
the Table-Talk, a book made up by his nephew from 
notes of his conversation during the last twelve years 
of his life. On the other hand, the accounts that have 
come down to us from his contemporaries seem little 
short of the incredible, — indeed, the only thing that 
makes them credible is the fact that they have come 
from men widely different in mind and character. A 
part of one of these accounts must serve for the many 
that might be quoted : " It was a Sabbath past expres- 
sion deep, and tranquil, and serene," whites his nephew, 
to "pass an entire day with Coleridge." "You came 
to a man who had travelled in many countries, and in 
critical times; avIio had seen and felt the world in 
most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and 
weaknesses ; one to whom all literature and genial art 
were absolutely subject, and to whom, with a reason- 
able allowance as to technical details, all science was 



xxvm INTRODUCTION 

in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout 
a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to yon 
in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones, concern- 
ing things human and divine ; marshalling all history, 
harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of 
your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and 
of terror to the imagination ; but pouring withal such 
floods of light upon the mind that you might, for a 
season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of con- 
version. And this he would do without so much as 
one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on 
others, save when any given act fell naturally in the 
way of his discourse — without one anecdote that was 
not proof and illustration of a previous position ; — 
gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with 
a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and 
onward forever through a thousand windings, yet with 
no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a 
focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his discourse should 
converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your 
teacher and guide; but in a little while you might for- 
get that he was other than a fellow-student and the 
companion of your way, — so playful was his manner, 
so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of 
his pleasant eye ! " l 

Coleridge's last years were burdened by an illness 
i Table-Talk (Bohn Ed.), pp. 4, 5. 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

which, with few and brief intervals, confined him to 
the sick-room. His own action had separated him 
from his wife and children, and these final days Avere 
gladdened only by the occasional visitor. His mind 
continued vigorous up to the last, and the evening be- 
fore the end he dictated to one at his bedside a part 
of his religious philosophy which he wished recorded. 
The next morning, July 25, 1834, he died. He was 
buried in the Highgate churchyard, and later the 
grammar school of the village was reared above his 
tomb — as if in mockery of the free spirit sleeping 
beneath. 

To no man in England since Shakspere could the 
epithet which Coleridge applied to the poet of Avon 
— " myriad-minded " — be so well applied as to Cole- 
ridge himself, and it is because Coleridge can be looked 
at from so many and such various points of view that the 
final word as to the true value of his work still remains 
to be spoken. Perhaps the most notable characteristic 
of his mind in those years after his poetic power 
had declined was that profoundness in his habits of 
thought which made him seek in all matters for the 
basal truth. He was, in brief, always going back to 
first principles, always viewing things in their causes. 
As to his character as a man, those who are unwilling 
to accept Carlyle's version of it, when he spoke of 
Coleridge's life as " the tragic story of a high endow- 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

raent with an insufficient will," may apply to it a 
large part of what Coleridge said about Hamlet: 
'•'Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the ab- 
stracting and generalizing habit over the practical. 
He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity ; 
but every incident sets him thinking ; . . . I have 
a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so." l But 
these words were his own condemnation, because 
many years before this he had said: "Action is the 
great end of all ; no intellect, however grand, is valu- 
able if it draw us from action, and lead us to think 
and think till the time of action is passed by and we 
can do nothing." 2 We should be careful, however, not 
to make too much of his defects. Some who have 
lived since his time have spoken of his "unlovely 
character," and have said that "he had no morals," 
but those who knew him in his habit as he lived loved 
and reverenced him. And whatever the judgment 
passed upon him, he was a man, take him for all in 
all, whose like we shall not look upon again. 

It only remains to say a word about his place in lit- 
•erature. As a journalist he moved on a high plane of 
thought and morality, and, by scorning the tactics of 
the mere politician and bringing his intellect to bear 
upon the momentous events of his time, became, at 

i Tablz-Talk, June 24, 1827. 

2 H. C. Robinson, Diary, Vol. I., Chap. XV. 



INTRODUCTION xxxi 

least in the broad view he took of all political prob- 
lems, the legitimate successor of the great Burke. 
As a theologian his influence was even more far- 
reaching. He was the votes at whose feet sat such 
men as Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, and Frederick 
Maurice. He sought to moralize and spiritualize the 
religion of England, and to find on the shadowy border 
between psychology and theology some relation be- 
tween the human and the divine. As a philosopher 
his special praise is again to be found in his influence. 
He left no system of philosophy, and his exposition 
of the transcendentalism of Kant and his followers 
was not thorough or systematic enough to be final. 
He was the means, however, of introducing England 
to German thought, and thus of inaugurating against 
the materialism of Locke and Paley the revolution 
out of which arose the transcendental movement, 
headed by Carlyle in England and by Emerson in 
America — the result, in a way, of Coleridge's influ- 
ence upon the intellect of his time. But great as was 
his influence in theology and metaphysics, his posi- 
tion as a critic is even more commanding. He is 
easily at the head of English philosophical criticism. 
Modern English criticism is indebted to Coleridge for 
some of its soundest principles, as well as much of 
its terminology and many of its famous dicta. He 
also revolutionized the accepted vieAv of Shakspere, 



xxxii IXTRODUCTION 

showing that his work was not the product of the 
wild, irregular genius of a pure child of nature, but 
of a poetic wisdom, which was as remarkable for its 
disclosure of judgment as for its manifestation of 
genius. 

As a poet Coleridge's rank is very much a matter 
of definitions. If we say, with Matthew Arnold, 
" that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life ; that the 
greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful 
application of ideas to life, — to the question : How 
to live," Coleridge must give precedence to many 
others, and to none of his contemporaries more than 
to Wordsworth ; but if we say, with Matthew Arnold 
again, that "poetry is simply the most delightful 
and perfect form of utterance that human words can 
reach," and add, with Coleridge himself, that the im- 
mediate object of poetry is "pleasure, not truth," then 
the rank assigned to the creator of the Ancient Mari- 
ner, of Kubla Khan, and of Christabel, must be high 
among the highest. In the fine harmony of his dic- 
tion and the pure power of his imagination, in the 
ability to do by means of words what the musician 
does by means of notes, what the painter does by 
means of colors, he had, among lyric poets, few 
equals, — he had no superior. 



INTRODUCTION xxxm 

II. SUBJECTS SUGGESTED FOR COMPOSI- 
TION 

1. The supernatural element in the Ancient Mari- 
ner. 2. The story of the poem. 3. The human char- 
acters in the poem. 4. The supernatural element in 
Kiibla Khan and Christabel. 5. The moral significance 
of the Ancient Mariner. 6. An answer to Words- 
worth's criticism : " The Poem of my Friend has indeed 
great defects ; first, that the principal person has no 
distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner 
or as a human being who having been long under the 
control of supernatural impressions might be supposed 
himself to partake of something supernatural: sec- 
ondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted 
upon : thirdly, that the events having no necessary 
connection do not produce each other ; and lastly, that 
the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated." 
7. An amplified description of some scene. 8. The 
story of the wedcling-feast — details not related to be 
supplied by the imagination. 9. An account of the 
course pursued by the ship. 10. A study in detail of 
the form of the poem. 11. A sketch illustrating some 
scene suggested by some one passage. 12. A com- 
parison of the present text with that of 1798. The 
older version is perhaps most easily accessible in Dow- 
den's reprint of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, 



XXXIV INTRODUCTION 

or in Campbell's Poetical Works of Coleridge. 13. What 
Coleridge's contemporaries thought of him. See E. T. 
Mason's Personal Traits of British Authors, which can 
be used as a stepping-stone to the works of the con- 
temporaries themselves. 14. A study of the prose 
gloss, "a gratuitous afterthought." 15. The Ancient 
Mariner as a poem of the sea. Was Swinburne right in 
saying that "it may seem as though this great sea- 
piece might have had more in it of the air and savor 
of the sea"? Compare it with some other of the 
sea-poems with which English literature abounds. 
16. Coleridge's diction. 17. His use of suggestion. 
18. His adaptation of scenery and other accessories to 
the spirit of the poem. 19. His use of the principle 
of contrast. 20. The poem as an illustration of the 
motto, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in 
rerum universitate. 21. The Albatross. See article in 
Encyclopaedia Britannica. 22. An attempt to inter- 
pret the poem as an allegory. After working out an 
original interpretation, consult The Journal of Specu- 
lative Philosophy, Vol. XIV., pp. 327-338. 23. Cole- 
ridge's use of some rhetorical figure, — the simile, for 
example. 24. The effect produced by the introduction, 
at different places in the poem, of the wedding-guest. 
25. Coleridge as a master of the monologue. In A. P. 
Russell's Characteristics will be found a selection of 
the best passages that have been written on Coleridge's 









INTRODUCTION XXXV 

wonderful ability as a talker. It would be better, 
however, if the student were himself to hunt out these 
passages in the works of Coleridge's contemporaries. 
26. A study of Coleridge's Christabel, Keats' Lamia, 
and Holmes' Elsie Vernier. 

III. BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Complete Works of S. T. Coleridge, edited by 
Professor Shedd, are published in seven volumes 
(Harper's). A cheaper edition of the prose works 
is that in the Bohn Library, while the best edition 
of his poems is edited in one volume by James Dykes 
Campbell (The Macmillan Co.). To these should be 
added the Letters of S. T. Coleridge and Anima Poetce 
(Houghton), edited by the poet's grandson, Ernest 
Hartley Coleridge. 

The latest and best narrative of Coleridge's life is 
by James Dykes Campbell (Macmillan), which may 
be supplemented with the Lives by Alois Brandl, 
Hall Caine, and H. D. Traill. Shorter accounts will 
be found in Rossetti's Lives of Famous Poets and in 
the Dictionary of National Biography. If the student 
desire to consult original sources he will find abun- 
dant references in the article on Coleridge in the 
Dictionary of National Biography, in Campbell's S. T. 
Coleridge, and in the very full bibliography appended 



XXX VI INTRODUCTION 

to Hall Caine's Life of Coleridge. Various contempo- 
rary portraits of Coleridge will be found in the works 
of Southey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, He 
Quincey, Hazlitt, Carlyle, and other noted men of 
his time. What will doubtless be the standard biog- 
raphy of the poet is being prepared by Mr. E. H. 
Coleridge. 

Helpful essays upon Coleridge and his work will be 
found in Arnold's Essays in Criticism: First Series 
(Joubert), Beers' Selections from Prose Writings of 
Coleridge, Brooke's The Golden Book of Coleridge, 
and Theology in English Poets, Cambridge Essays 
(1856), Courthope's Liberal Movement in English Lit- 
erature, Craik's English Prose, Dixon's English Poetry, 
Dowden's Studies in Literature and New Studies in 
Literature, G-arnett's Poetry of Coleridge, Johnson's 
Three Americayis and Three Englishmen, Lowell's 
Democracy and Other Addresses, Mill's Dissertations 
and Discussions, Pater's Appreciations, Shairp's Studies 
in Philosophy and Poetry, Shedd's Literary Essays, 
Swinburne's Essays and Studies, Warner's Library of 
World's Best Literature, Whipple's Essays and Reviews, 
and Wilson's (Christopher North's) Essays, Critical and 
Imaginative. Magazine articles worthy of note are: 
Edinburgh Review, vol. xxvii, 1816 (good only as an 
example of the unappreciative review of the time), 
Blackwood's Magazine, vol. vi, 1819, vol. ex, 1871, 






INTRODUCTION XXXV11 

Westminster Review, vol. xii, 1830, Christian Examiner, 
vol. xiv, 1833, North American Review, vol. xxxix, 
1834, Quarterly Review, vol. lii, 1834, vol. cxxv, 1868, 
Presbyterian Quarterly Review, vol. iv, 1856, North 
British Review, vol. xliii, 1865, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 
xlv, 1880, vol. lxxvi, 1895, Contemporary Review, 
vol. lxvii, 1895, Poet-Lore, vol. x, 1898. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



IN SEVEN PAKTS 



Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles iu 
rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enar- 
rabit? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum mu- 
nera? Quidagunt? quae loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam 
semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, 
interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabula, 
majoris et melioris mundi imagiuem contemplari : ne mens assue- 
facta hodiernse vitas minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat 
in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, 
modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distingua- 
mus. — T. Burnet, Archseol. Phil., p. 08. 

ARGUMENT 

° How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to 
the cold Country towards the South Pole ; and how from thence 
she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific 
Ocean ; and of the strange things that befell ; and in what manner 
the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. (1798.) 

Part I 

It is an ancient Mariner, An ancient Mari- 

ner meeteth 
And lie Stoppetll One Of three. three Gallants 

. hidden to a wed- 

"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, ding-feast, and 

. detaineth one. 

.Now wherefore stopp st thou me c 

B 1 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 
And I am next of kin ; 6 

The guests are met, the feast is set : 
May'st hear the merry din." 

He holds him with his skinny hand, 
" There was a ship," ° quoth he. 10 

" Hold off ! unhand me, grey -beard loon ! " ° 
Eftsoons his hand dropt he. 



The Wedding- He holds him with his glittering eye c 

Guest is spell- „ TTT _, „ , ?„ J 

bound by the eye The \\ eddlllg-GrUest Stood still, 

of the old sea- -, a ■>• i--, * t • i i 

faring man, and And listens like a three years child 
hear his tale. The Mariner hath his will. 



The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone : 
He° cannot choose but hear ; 

And thus spake on that ancient man, 
The bright-eyed Mariner. 



"The ship was cheered, the harbour 
cleared, 

Merrily did we drop 
Below the kirk, below the hill, 

Below the lighthouse top. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



The Sun came up upon the left, 25 

Out of the sea came he ! 
And he shone bright, and on the right 

Went down into the sea. 

Higher and higher every day, 

Till over the mast at noon — " 30 

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, 

For he heard the loud bassoon. 



The Mariner 
tells how the 
ship sailed 
southward with 
a good wind and 
fair weather, till 
it reached the 
Line. 



The bride hath paced into the hall, 

Red as a rose is she ; 
Nodding their heads before her goes 

The merry minstrelsy. 



35 



The Wedding- 
Guest heareth 
the bridal music; 
but the Mariner 
continueth his 
tale. 



The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, 
Yet he cannot choose but hear ; 

And thus spake on that ancient man, 
The bright-eyed Mariner. 40 



"And now the Storm-blast came, and 
he 

Was tyrannous and strong : 
He struck with his o'ertaking wings, 

And chased us south along. 



The ship drawn ° 
by a storm 
toward the 
south pole. 



4 THE RIME OF THE AX CI EXT MARINER 

With sloping masts and dipping prow. 45 
As who pursued with yell and blow 
Still treads the shadow of his foe, 

And forward bends his head, 
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, 

And southward aye we fled. 50 

And now there came both mist and 
snow, 

And it grew wondrous cold : 
And ice, mast-high, came floating by, 

As green as emerald. 

The land of ice, And through, the drifts the snowy clifts 

and of fearful _ . _ ? -, . , , 

sounds where no Did send a dismal sheen : 56 

living thing was _ , . . 

to be seen. JNor shapes or men nor beasts we ken — 

The ice was all between. 

The ice° was here, the ice was there, 

The ice was all around : 60 

It cracked and growled, and roared and 
howled, 
Like noises in a swound ! 

Tin a great sea- At length did cross an Albatross, 

bird, called the 

Albatross, came Thorough the fog it came ; 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



As if it had been a Christian soul, 65 through the 

J snow-tog, and 

We hailed it in God's name. was received 

with great joy 



and hospitality. 



It ate the food it ne'er had eat, 

And round and round it flew. 
The ice did split with a thunder-fit ; 

The helmsman steered us through ! 70 

And a good south wind sprung up behind ; And lo! the ai- 

J x e> i. j batross proveth 

The Albatross did follow, a bird of good 

omen, and fol- 

And every day, for food or play, loweth the ship 

1 • , o i \ 1 as il returned 

Came to the mariner s hollo! northward 

through fog and 
floating ice. 

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, 75 

It perched for vespers nine ; 
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke 
white, 

Glimmered the white moon-shine." 

'•' God save thee, ancient Mariner, 79 The ancient 

7 ' v Manner mhos- 

From the fiends, that plague thee thus ! — pitabiy kiiieth 

r . the pious bird of 

Why look'st thou so ? " — " With my cross- good omen, 
bow 
1° shot the Albatross. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



Part II 

The° Sun now rose upon the right: 

Out of the sea came he, 
Still hid in mist, and on the left 

Went down into the sea. 



s 5 



And the good south wind still blew be- 
hind, 

But no sweet bird did follow, 
Nor any day for food or play 

Came to the mariners' ° hollo ! 90 



His shipmates 
cry out against 
the ancient 
Mariner, for 
killing the bird 
of good luck. 



But when the 
fog cleared off, 
they justify the 
same, and thus 
make them- 
selves accompli- 
ces in the crime. 



And I had done a hellish thing, 

And it would work 'em woe : 
For all averred, I had killed the bird 

That made the breeze to blow. 
Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay, 95 

That made the breeze to blow ! 

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, 

The glorious Sun uprist : 
Then all averred, I had killed the bird 

That brought the fog and mist. 100 

'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, 

That bring the fog and mist. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 

The furrow followed free ; 
We were the first that ever burst 105 

Into that silent sea.° 



The fair breeze 
continues ; the 
ship enters the 
Pacilic Ocean, 
and sails north- 
ward, even till it 
reaches the Line. 



Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt 
down, 

'Twas sad as sad could be ; 
And we did speak only to break 

The silence of the sea ! u 



The ship hath 
been suddenly 
becalmed. 



All° in a hot and copper sky, 
The bloody Sun, at noon, 

Eight up above the mast did stand, 
No bigger than the Moon. 

Day after day, clay after day, 

We stuck, nor breath nor motion ; 

As° idle as a painted ship 
Upon a painted ocean. 



Water, water, every where, 
And all the boards did shrink ; 

Water, water, every where, 
Nor any drop to drink. 



And the Alba- 
tross begins to 
[20 be avenged. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



The very deep did rot : Christ ! 

That ever this should be ! 
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 

Upon the slimy sea. 



125 



A Spirit bad fol- 
lowed them; one 
of the invisible 
inhabitants of 
this planet, 
neither departed 
souls nor angels; 
concerning' 
whom the 
learned Jew, 
Josephus, and 
the Platonic 
Constantinopoli- 
tan, Michael 
Psellus, may be 
consulted. They 
are very numer- 
ous, and there is 
no climate or ele- 
ment without 
one or more. 

The shipmates, 
in their sore dis- 
tress, would fain 
throw the whole 
guilt on the an- 
cient Mariner; 
in sign whereof 
they hang the 
dead sea-bird 
round his neck. 



About, about, in reel and rout 
The death-fires danced at night ; 

The° water, like a witch's oils, 

Burnt green, and blue, and white. 130 

And some in dreams assured were 
Of the spirit that plagued us so ; 

Nine fathom deep he had followed us 
From the land of mist and snow. 

And every tongue, through utter drought, 
Was withered at the root ; 136 

We could not speak, no more than if 
We had been choked with soot. 



Ah ! well-a-day ! ° what evil looks 
Had I from old and young ! 

Instead of the cross, the Albatross 
About my neck was hung. 



140 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



Part III 



There passed a weary time. Each throat 
Was parched, and glazed each eye. 

A weary time ! a weary time ! 145 

How glazed each weary eye, 

When looking westward, I beheld 
A something in the sky. 



At first it seemed a little speck, 
And then it seemed a mist ; 

It moved and moved, and took at last 
A certain shape, I wist.° 



[50 



The ancient 
Mariner behold- 
eth a sign in the 
element afar off. 



A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist ! 

And still it neared and neared : 
As if it dodged a water-sprite, 

It plunged and tacked and veered. 



: 55 



With throats unslaked, with black lips 
baked, 

We could nor laugh nor wail ; 
Through utter drought all dumb we stood ! 
I bit my arm, I sucked the bloody 160 

And cried, A sail ! a sail ! 



At its nearer 
approach, it 
seeineth him to 
be a ship; and at 
a dear ransom 
he freeth his 
speech from the 
bonds of thirst. 



10 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



A flash of joy 



With throats unslaked, with black lips 
baked, 

Agape they heard me call : 
Gramercy ! they for joy did grin, 
And all at once their breath drew in, 165 

As they were drinking all. 



And horror fol- 
lows. For can 
it be a ship that 
comes onward 
without wind or 
tide? 



See ! see ! (I cried) she tacks no more ! 

Hither to work us weal 5 
Without a. breeze, without a tide, 

She steadies with upright keel ! 



The western wave was all a-flame. 

The day was well nigh done ! 
Almost upon the western wave 

Rested the broad bright Sun ; 
When that strange shape drove 
denly 

Betwixt us and the Sun. 



sud- 



75 



It seemeth him 
but the skeleton 
of a ship. 



And straight the Sun° was flecked with 
bars, 

(Heaven's Mother send us grace !) 
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered 

With broad and burning face. 180 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



11 



Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) 
How fast she nears and nears ! 

Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, 
Like restless gossameres ? ° 



Are° those her ribs through which the 
Sun 185 

Did peer, as through a grate ? 
And is that AVoman all her crew ? 
Is that a Death ? ° and are there two ? 

Is Death that Woman's mate ? 



And its ribs are 
seen as bars on 
the face of the 
setting Sun. 
The Spectre- 
Woman and her 
Death-mate, and 
no other on 
board the skele- 
ton ship. 



Her lips were red, her looks were free, 190 Like vessel, like 

Her locks were yellow as gold : 
Her skin was as white as leprosy, 
The Night-mare° Life-in-Death was she, 

Who thicks man's blood with cold. 



105 



The naked hulk alongside came, 
And the twain were casting dice ; 

'The game is done ! I've won ! I've won ! ' 
Quoth she, and whistles thrice. 



The Sun's rim dips ; the stars rush out : 
At one stride comes the dark ; 



Death and Life- 
in-Death have 
diced for the 
ship's crew, and 
she (the latter) 
winneth the an- 
cient Mariner. 



No twilight 
within the 
courts of the 

200 Sun. 



12 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



With far-heard whisper , o'er the sea, 
Off shot the spectre-bark. 

4lMoon* ng ° f We listened and looked sideways up ! 
Fear at my heart, as at a cup, 

My life-blood seemed to sip ! 205 

The stars were dim, and thick the night, 
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed 
white ; 
From the sails the dew did drip — 
Till clomb above the eastern bar 
The horned Moon, with oue bright 

star 210 

Within the nether tip. 



One after 
another. 



One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, 

Too quick for groan or sigh, 
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, 

And cursed me with his eye. 215 



His shipmates 
drop down dead. 



Four times fifty living men, 

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan) 

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, 
They dropped down one by one. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



13 



The souls did from their bodies fly, — 

They fled to bliss or woe ! 
And every soul, it passed me by, 

Like the whizz of my cross-bow° ! " 



But Life-in- 
Peath begins her 
work on the an- 
cient Mariner. 



Part IV 



" I fear thee, ancient Mariner ! 

I fear thy skinny hand ! 2 

And thou art long, and lank, and brown, 

As is the ribbed sea-sand. 



The Wedding- 
Guest feareth 
'■$ that a Spirit is 
talking to hini ; 



I fear thee and thy glittering eye, 
And thy skinny hand, so brown." — 

" Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest ! 
This body dropt not down. 231 



But the ancient 
Mariner assur- 
eth him of his 
bodily life, and 
proceedeth to 
relate his horri- 
ble penance. 



Alone, alone, all, all alone, 
Alone on a wide wide sea ! 

And never a° saint took pity on 
My soul in agony. 



2 35 



The many men, so beautiful ! 
And they all dead did lie : 



He despiseth the 
creatures of the 
calm. 



14 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

And a thousand thousand sliniy things 
Lived on ; and so did I. 

And envieth that I looked upon the rotting Sea, 240 

they should live, l & > * 

and so many lie And drew my eyes away ; 

I looked upon the rotting deck, 
And there the dead men lay. 

I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray ; 

But or ever a prayer had gusht, 245 

A wicked whisper came, and made 

My heart as dry as dust. 

I closed my lids, and kept them close, 
And the balls like pulses beat ; 

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and 
the sky 250 

Lay like a load on my weary eye, 
And the dead were at my feet. 



But the curse The cold sweat melted from their limbs, 

liveth for him in „. , , . -. , , 

the eye of the .N or rot nor reek did they : 

The look with which they looked on 

me 25: 

Had never passed away. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



15 



An orphan's curse would drag to Hell 

A spirit from on high ; 
But oh ! more horrible than that 

Is a curse in a dead man's eye ! 260 

Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, 

And yet I could not die. 

The moving Moon went up the sky, 

And no where did abide : 
Softly she was going up, 265 

And a star or two beside — 

Her beams bemocked the sultry main, 

Like April hoar-frost spread; 
But where the ship's huge shadow lay, 
The charmed water burnt alway 270 

A still and awful red. 

Beyond the shadow of the ship, 

I watched the water-snakes : 
They moved in tracks of shining white, 
And when they reared, the elfish light 275 

Fell off in hoary flakes. 

Within the shadow of the ship 
I watched their rich attire : 



In his loneliness 
and fixedness he 
yearneth 
towards the 
journeying 
Moon, "and the 
stars that still 
sojourn, yet 
still move on- 
ward; and every- 
where the blue 
sky belongs to 
them, and is 
their appointed 
rest, and their 
native country 
and their own 
natural homes, 
which they enter 
unannounced, as 
lords that are 
certainly ex- 
pected and yet 
there is a silent 
joy at their 
arrival. 

By the light of 
the Moon he be- 
holdeth God's 
creatures of the 
great calm. 



16 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, 
They coiled and swam ; and every track 280 
Was° a flash of golden fire. 



t T h h eii r hapffis d ° ha PPy livin g things ! no tongue 



He blesseth 
them in his 
heart. 



Their beauty might declare : 
A spring of love gushed from my heart, 

And I blessed them unaware : 
Sure my kind saint took pity on me, 

And I blessed them unaware. 



The spell begins 
to break. 



The selfsame moment I could pray ; 

And from my neck so free 
The° Albatross fell off, and sank 

Like lead into the sea. 



290 



Part V 



0h° sleep ! it is a gentle thing, 

Beloved from pole to pole ! 
To Mary Queen the praise be given ! 
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, 295 

That slid into my soul. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



17 



The silly buckets on the deck, 

That had so long remained, 
I dreamt that they were filled with dew ; 

And when I awoke, it rained. 300 



By grace of the 
holy Mother, the 
ancient Mariner 
is refreshed with 
rain. 



My lips were wet, my throat was cold, 

My garments all were dank ; 
Sure I had drunken in my dreams, 

And still my body drank. 

I moved, and could not feel my limbs : 305 

I was so light — almost 
I thought that I had died in sleep, 

And was a blessed ghost. 



And soon I heard a roaring wind : 

It did not come anear ; 
But with its sound it shook the sails, 

That were so thin and sere. 



310 



He heareth 
sounds and seeth 
strange sights 
and commotions 
in the sky and 
the element. 



The upper air burst into life ! 

And a hundred fire-flags sheen, 
To and fro they were hurried about ! 
And to and fro, and in and out, 

The wan stars danced between. 



315 



18 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

And the coming wind did roar more loud, 
And the sails did sigh like sedge ; 

And the rain poured down from one black 
cloud ; 320 

The Moon was at its edge. 

The thick black cloud was cleft, and still 

The Moon was at its side : 
Like waters shot from some high crag, 
The lightning fell with never a jag, 325 

A river steep and wide. 



The bodies of the The loud wind never reached the ship, 

ship s crew are A ' 

inspired, and Yet now the ship moved on ! 

the ship moves 



Beneath the lightning and the Moon 
The dead men gave a groan. 



33° 



They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,. 

Nor spake, nor moved their eyes ; 
It had been strange, even in a dream, 

To have seen those dead men rise. 

The helmsman steered, the ship moved 
on ; . 335 

Yet never a breeze up blew ; 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



19 



The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, 

Where they were wont to do ; 
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools — 

We were a ghastly crew. 340 

The body of my brother's son 

Stood by me, knee to knee : 
The body and I pulled at one rope, 

But° he said nought to me." 



" I fear thee, ancient Mariner ! " 345 

" Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest ! 
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain, 
Which to their corses came again, 
But a troop of spirits blest : 

For when it dawned — they dropped their 
arms, 35 o 

And clustered round the mast ; 
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their 
mouths, . 
And from their bodies passed. 

Around, around, flew each sweet sound, 
Then darted to the Sun; 355 



But not by the 
souls of the men, 
nor by daemons 
of earth or mid- 
dle air, but by a 
blessed troop of 
angelic spirits, 
sent down by the 
invocation of the 
guardian saint. 



20 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

Slowly the sounds came back again, 
Now mixed, now one by one. 

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky 

I heard the sky-lark sing ; 
Sometimes all little birds that are, 360 

How they seemed to fill the sea and air 
With their sweet jargoning ! 

And now 'twas like all instruments, 

Now like a lonely flute ; 
And now it is an angel's song, 365 

That makes the Heavens be mute. 

It ceased; yet still the sails made on 

A pleasant noise till noon, 
A noise like of a hidden brook 

In the leafy month of June, 370 

That to the sleeping woods all night 

Singeth a quiet tune. 

Till noon we quietly sailed on, 
Yet never a breeze did breathe : 

Slowly and smoothly went the ship, 375 

Moved onward from beneath. 






THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



21 



Under the keel nine fathom deep, 
From the land of mist and snow, 

The spirit slid : and it was he 
That made the ship to go. 

The sails at noon left off their tune, 
And the ship stood still also. 



380 



The lonesome 
Spirit from the 
south-pole car- 
ries on the ship 
as far as the 
Line, in obedi- 
ence to the an- 
gelic troop, but 
still requireth 
vengeance. 



The Sun,° right up above the mast, 

Had fixed her to the ocean : 
But in a minute she 'ga^n stir, 

With a short uneasy motion — 
Backwards and forwards half her length 

With a short uneasy motion. 



385 



Then like a pawing horse let go, 
She made a sudden bound : 

It flung the blood into my head, 
And I fell down in a swound. 



390 



How long in that same fit I lay, 

I have not to declare ; 
But ere my living life returned, 
I heard and in my soul discerned 

Two voices in the air. 



395 



The Polar 

Spirit's fellow- 
daemons, the 
invisible inhabi- 
tants of the ele- 
ment, take part 
in his wrong ; 
and two of them 
relate, one to the 



22 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



other that pen- t J s ft } ie ? t quo tll Olie, ' Is this the 
ance long and - 1 

heavy for the m an? 



ancient Manner 



man 



hath been By Him who died on cross, 

accorded to the ^ 

Polar spirit, who "With his cruel bow he laid full low 

returneth 

southward. The harmless Albatross. 



400 



The spirit who bideth by himself 

In the land of mist and snow, 
He loved the bird that loved the man 

Who shot him with his bow.' 405 

The other was a softer voice, 

As° soft as honey-dew : 
Quoth he, ' The man hath penance done, 

And penance more will do.' 



Part VI 

FIRST VOICE 



'But tell me, tell me ! speak again, 410 

Thy soft response renewing — 

What makes that ship drive on so fast ? 
Wliat is the Ocean doing ? ' 






THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



23 



SECOND VOICE 

* Still as a slave before his lord, 
The Ocean hath no blast ; 

His great bright eye most silently 
Up to the Moon is cast — 



415 



If he may know which way to go ; 

For she guides him smooth or grim. 
See, brother, see ! how graciously 

She looketh down on him.' 



420 



FIRST VOICE 

' But why drives on that ship so fast, 
Without or wave or wind ? ' 

SECOND VOICE 

1 The air is cut away before, 
And closes from behind. 



The Mariner 
hath been cast 
into a trance; for 
the angelic 
power causeth 
the vessel to 
drive northward 
faster than 
human life could 
endure. 



425 



Ely, brother, fly ! more high, more high ! 

Or we shall be belated : 
For slow and slow that ship will go, 

When the Mariner's trance is abated.' 



24 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



The supernatu- 
ral motion is 
retarded ; the 
Mariner awakes, 
and his penance 
begins anew. 



The curse is 
finally expiated. 



I woke, and we were sailing on 430 

As in a gentle weather : 
'Twas night, calm night, the Moon was high, 



The dead men stood together. 



All stood together on the deck, 
For a enamel-dungeon fitter : 

All fixed on me their stony eyes, 
That in the Moon did glitter. 



435 



The pang, the curse, with which they died, 

Had never passed away : 
I could not draw my eyes from theirs, 440 

Nor turn them up to pray. 

And now this spell was snapt : once more 

I viewed the ocean green, 
And looked far forth, yet little saw 

Of what had else been seen — 445 

Like one, that on a lonesome road 

Doth walk in fear and dread, 
And having once turned round walks on, 

And turns no more his head ; 
Because he knows, a frightful fiend 450 

Doth close behind him tread. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



25 



But soon there breathed a wind on me, 

Nor sound nor motion made: 
Its path was not upon the sea, 

In° ripple or in shade. 455 

It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek 
Like a meadow-gale of spring — 

It mingled strangely with my fears, 
Yet it felt like a welcoming. 



Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, 
Yet she sailed softly too : 

Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze 
On me alone it blew. 



460 



Oh ! dream of joy ! is this indeed 
The lighthouse top I see ? 

Is this the hill ? is this the kirk ? 
Is this mine own countree ? 



And the ancient 
Mariner behold- 
eth his native 
4"5 country. 



We drifted o'er the harbour-bar, 
And I with sobs did pray — 

let me be awake, my God ! 
Or let me sleep alway. 



470 



26 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT 51 A FINER 



The harbour-bay was clear as glass, 
So smoothly it was strewn ! 

And on the bay the moonlight lay, 
And the shadow of the Moon. 



475 



The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, 
That stands above the rock : 

The° moonlight steeped in silentness 
The steady weathercock. 



The angelic And the bay was white with silent light, 

spirits leave the „,.„ . . 

dead bodies, Till ri sing from the same, 

Full many shapes, that shadows were, 
In crimson colours came. 



And appear in A little distance froni the prow 

their own forms „,, . , , 

of light. Those crimson shadows were : ■ 485 

I turned my eyes upon the deck — 
Oh, Christ ! what saw I there ! 



Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, 

And, by the holy rood ! 
A man all light, a seraph-man, 

On every corse there stood. 



490 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 27 

This seraph-band, each waved his hand : 

It was a heavenly sight ! 
They stood as signals to the land, 

Each one a lovely light ; 495 

This seraph-band, each waved his hand, 

No voice did they impart — 
No voice ; bnt oh ! the silence sank 

Like music on mj heart. 

But soon I heard the clash of oars, 500 

I heard the Pilot's cheer ; 
My head was turned perforce away, 

And° I saw a boat appear. 

The Pilot and the Pilot's boy, 

I heard them coming fast : 505 

Dear Lord in Heaven ! it was a joy 
The dead men could not blast. 

I saw a third — I heard his voice : 

It is the Hermit good ! 
He singeth loud his godly hymns 510 

That he makes in the wood. 
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away 

The Albatross's blood. 



28 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIEXT MARINER 



The Hermit of 
the Wood 



Part VII 

This Hermit good lives in that wood 
Which slopes down to the sea. 

How loudly his sw^eet voice he rears ! 

He loves to talk with marineres 
That come from a far countree. 



5'5 



He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve 
He hath a cushion plump :° 

It is the moss that wholly hides 
The rotted old oak-stump. 



520 



The skiff-boat neared : I heard them talk, 
' Why, this is strange, I trow ! 

Where are those lights so many and fair, 
That signal made but now ? ' 526 



Approacheth 
the ship with 
wonder. 



1 Strange, by my faith ! ' the Hermit said — 
' And they answered not our cheer ! 

The planks looked warped ! and see those 
sails, 
How thin they are and sere ! 530 

I never saw aught like to them, 
Unless perchance it were 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



29 



Brown skeletons of leaves that lag 

My forest-brook along ; 
When the ivy-tod° is heavy with snow, 535 
And the owlet whoops to the wolf be- 
low, 

That eats the she-wolf's young.' 

< Dear Lord ! it hath a fiendish look — 

(The Pilot made reply) 
I am a-f eared ' — ' Push on, push on ! ' 540 

Said the Hermit cheerily. 

The boat came closer to the ship, 

But I nor spake nor stirred ; 
The boat came close beneath the ship, 

And straight a sound was heard. 545 



Under the water it rumbled on, 
Still louder and more dread : 

It reached the ship, it split the bay ; 
The° ship went down like lead. 



The ship sud- 
denly sinketh. 



Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, 
Which sky and ocean smote, 551 



The ancient 
Mariner is saved 
in the Pilot's 
boat. 



30 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

Like one that hath been seven days 
drowned 

My body lay afloat; 
Bnt swift as dreams, myself I found 

Within the Pilot's boat. 555 

Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, 
The boat spun round and round ; 

And all was still, save that the hill 
Was telling of the sound. 

I moved my lips — the Pilot shrieked 560 

And fell down in a fit ; 
The holy Hermit raised his eyes, 

And prayed where he did sit. 

I took the oars : the Pilot's boy, 

Who now doth crazy go, 565 

Laughed loud and long, and all the while 
His eyes went to and fro. 

'Ha, ha! ' quoth he, 'full plain I see, 
The Devil knows Iioav to row.' 

And now, all in my own countree, 570 

I stood on the firm land ! 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 



31 



The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, 
And scarcely he could stand. 

' shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man ! ' 
The Hermit crossed his brow, 575 

' Say quick/ quoth he, ' I bid thee say — 
What manner of man art thou ? ' 



Forthwith this frame of mind was 
wrenched 

With a woful agony, 
Which forced me to begin my tale; 

And then it left me free. 



580 



Since then, at an uncertain hour, 

That agony returns ; 
And till my ghastly tale is told, 

This heart within me burns. 



585 



1° pass, like night, from land to land; 

I have strange power of speech ; 
That moment that his face I see, 
I know the man that must hear me: 

To him my tale I teach. 590 

What loud uproar bursts from that door ! 
The wedding-guests are there : 



The ancient 
Mariner ear- 
nestly entreateth 
the Hermit to 
shrieve hirn ; 
and the penance 
of life falls on 
him. 



And ever and 
anon throughout 
his future life an 
agony constrain- 
eth him to travel 
from land to 
land, 



32 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 

But in the garden-bower the bride 
And bride-maids singing are : 

And hark the little vesper bell, 595 

Which biddeth me to prayer ! 

Wedding-Guest ! this soul hath been 

Alone on a wide wide sea : 
So lonely 'twas, that God himself 

Scarce seemed there to be. 600 

sweeter than the marriage-feast, 

'Tis sweeter far to me, 
To walk together to the kirk 

With a goodly company ! — 

To walk together to the kirk, 605 

And all together pray, 
While each to his great Father bends, 
Old men, and babes, and loving friends, 

And youths and maidens gay ! 



And to teach, by Farewell, farewell! but this I tell 610 

his own exam- 
ple, love and To thee, thou Wedding-Guest ! 

reverence to all 

tilings that God He prayeth well, who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast. 



THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 33 

He prayeth best, who loveth best 

All things both great and small ; 615 

For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all." 

The Mariner, whose eye is bright, 

Whose beard with age is hoar, 
Is gone : and now the Wedding-Guest 620 

Turned from the bridegroom's door. 

He went like one that hath been stunned, 

And is of sense forlorn : 
A sadder and a wiser man, 

He rose the morrow morn. 625 

D 



KUBLA KHAN 



In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 

A stately pleasure-dome decree : 

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 

Through caverns measureless to man 

Down to a sunless sea. 5 

So twice rive miles of fertile ground 

With walls and towers were girdled round : 

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, 

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ; 

And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10 

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. 

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! 
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15 

By woman wailing for her demon-lover ! 
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 

35 



36 KUBLA KHAN 

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 
Amid whose swift half-intermitted bnrst 
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail : 
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 
It flung up momently the sacred river. 
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 
Then reached the caverns measureless to man, 
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean : 
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
Ancestral voices prophesying war ! 

The shadow of the dome of pleasure 

Floated midway on the waves ; 

Where was heard the mingled measure 

From the fountain and the caves. 
It was a miracle of rare device, 
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! 

A damsel with a dulcimer 
In a vision once I saw : 
It was an Abyssinian maid, 
And on her dulcimer she played, 
Singing of Mount Abora. 



KUBLA KHAN 37 

Could I revive within me 

Her symphony and song, 

To such a deep delight 'twould win me, 
That with music loud and long, 

I would build that dome in air, 45 

That sunny dome ! those caves of ice ! 
And all who heard should see them there, 
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware ! 
His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! 
Weave a circle round him thrice, 5 o 

And close your eyes with holy dread, 
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise. 



CHRISTABEL 



PART THE FIRST 

'Tis° the middle of night by the castle clock, 
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock, 

Tu ° — whit ! Tu — whoo ! 

And hark, again ! the crowing cock, 

How drowsily it crew. 5 

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, 

Hath a toothless mastiff, which 

From her kennel beneath the rock 

Maketh answer to the clock, 

Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour ; 10 

Ever and aye, by shine and shower, 

Sixteen short howls, not over loud ; 

Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. 

Is the night chilly and dark ? 

The night is chilly, but not dark. 15 

The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 



40 CHRIST ABEL 

It covers but not hides the sky. 

The moon is behind, and at the full ; 

And yet she looks both small and dull. 

The night is chill, the cloud is gray : 20 

'Tis a month before the month of May, 

And the Spring comes slowly up this way. 

The lovely lady, Christabel, 

Whom her father loves so well, 

What makes her in the wood so late, 25 

A furlong from the castle gate ? 

She had dreams all yesternight 

Of her own betrothed knight ; 

And she in the midnight wood will pray 

For the weal of her lover that's far away. 30 

She stole along, she nothing spoke, 

The sighs she heaved were soft and low, 

And naught was green upon the oak 

But moss and rarest mistletoe : 

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 35 

And in silence prayeth she. 



The lady sprang np suddenly, 
The lovely lady, Christabel ! 



CHRIST ABEL 41 

It moaned as near, as near can be, 

But what it is she cannot tell. 4° 

On the other side it seems to be, 

Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. 

The night is chill ; the forest bare ; 

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ? 

There is not wind enough in the air 45 

To move away the ringlet curl 

From the lovely lady's cheek — 

There is not wind enough to twirl 

The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 

That dances as often as dance it can, 50 

Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. 

Hush, beating heart of Christabel ! 
Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! 
She folded her arms beneath her cloak, 55 

And stole to the other side of the oak. 
What sees she there ? 

There she sees a damsel bright, 

Drest in a silken robe of white, 

That shadowy in the moonlight shone : 60 



42 CHRIST ABEL 

The neck that made that white robe wan, 

Her stately neck, and arms were bare ; 

Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were, 

And wildly glittered here and there 

The gems entangled in her hair. 65 

I guess, 'twas frightful there to see 

A lady so richly clad as she — 

Beautiful exceedingly ! 

Mary mother, save me now ! 

(Said Christabel,) And who art thou ? 70 

The lady strange made answer meet, 

And her voice was faint and sweet : — 

Have pity on my sore distress, 

I scarce can speak for weariness : 

Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear ! 75 

Said Christabel, How earnest thou here ? 

And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, 

Did thus pursue her answer meet : — 

My sire is of a noble line, 

And my name is Geraldine : 80 

Five warriors seized me yestermorn, 

Me, even me, a maid forlorn : 



CHRIST ABEL 43 

They choked my cries with force and fright, 

And tied me on a palfrey white. 

The palfrey was as fleet as wind, S5 

And they rode furiously behind. 

They spurred amain, their steeds were white : 

And once we crossed the shade of night. 

As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, 

I have no thought what men they be ; 90 

Nor do I know how long it is 

( For I have lain entranced I wis ) 

Since one, the tallest of the five, 

Took me from the palfrey's back, 

A weary woman, scarce alive. 95 

Some muttered words his comrades spoke : 

He placed me underneath this oak ; 

He swore they would return with haste ; 

Whither they went I cannot tell — 

I thought I heard, some minutes past, 100 

Sounds as of a castle bell. 

Stretch forth thy hand ( thus ended she ), 

And help a wretched maid to flee. 

Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, 

And comforted fair Geraldine : 105 

well, bright dame ! may you command 



44 CHRIST ABEL 

The service of Sir Leoline ; 

And gladly our stout chivalry 

Will he send forth and friends withal 

To guide and guard you safe and free no 

Home to your noble father's hall. 

She rose : and forth with steps they passed 

That strove to be, and were not, fast. 

Her gracious stars the lady blest, 

And thus spake on sweet Christabel : 115 

All our household are at rest, 

The hall as silent as the cell ; 

Sir Leoline is weak in health, 

And may not well awakened be, 

But we will move as if in stealth, 120 

And I beseech your courtesy, 

This night, to share your couch with me. 

They crossed the moat, and Christabel 

Took the key that fitted well ; 

A little door she opened straight, 125 

All in the middle of the gate ; 

The gate that was ironed within and without, 

Where an army in battle array had marched out. 

The lady sank, belike through pain, 






CHRIST ABEL 45 

And Christabel with might and main 130 

Lifted her up, a weary weight, 

Over the threshold of the gate : 

Then the lady rose again, 

And moved, as she were not in pain. 

So free from danger, free from fear, 135 

They crossed the court : right glad they were. 

And Christabel devoutly cried 

To the lady by her side, 

Praise we the Virgin all divine 

Who hath rescued thee from thy distress ! 140 

Alas, alas ! said Geraldine, 

I cannot speak for weariness. 

So free from danger, free from fear, 

They crossed the court : right glad they were. 

Outside her kennel, the mastiff old 145 

Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. 

The mastiff old did not aAvake, 

Yet she an angry moan did make ! 

And what can ail the mastiff bitch? 

Never till now she uttered yell 150 

Beneath the eye of Christabel. 

Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch : 

For what can ail the mastiff bitch ? 



46 CHRISTABEL 

They passed the hall, that echoes still, 

Pass as lightly as you will ! 155 

The brands were flat, the brands were dying, 

Amid their own white ashes lying ; 

But when the lady passed, there came 

A tongue of light, a fit of flame ; 

And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 160 

And nothing else saw she thereby, 

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, 

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. 

softly tread, said Christabel, 

My father seldom sleepeth well. 165 

Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, 

And jealous of the listening air 

They steal their way from stair to stair, 

Now in glimmer, and now in gloom, 

And now they pass the Baron's room, 170 

As still as death, with stifled breath ! 

And now have reached her chamber door ; 

And now doth Gerald ine press down 

The rushes of the chamber floor. 

The° moon shines dim in the open air, 175 

And not a moonbeam enters here. 



CHRISTABEL 47 

But they without its light can see 

The chamber carved so curiously, 

Carved with figures strange and sweet, 

All made out of the carver's brain, 180 

For a lady's chamber meet : 

The lamp with twofold silver chain 

Is fastened to an angel's feet. 

The silver lamp burns dead and dim ; 

But Christabel the lamp will trim. 185 

She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, 

And left it swinging to and fro, 

While Geraldine, in wretched plight, 

Sank down upon the floor below. 

weary lady, Geraldine, 190 

1 pray you ; drink this cordial wine ! 
It is a wine of virtuous powers ; 
My mother made it of wild flowers. 

And will your mother pity me, 

Who am a maiden most forlorn ? 195 

Christabel answered — Woe is me ! 

She died the hour that I was born. 

I have heard the gray -haired friar tell 



48 CHRIST ABEL 

How on her death-bed she did say, 

That she should hear the castle-bell 200 

Strike twelve upon my wedding-day. 

mother dear ! that thou wert here ! 

1 would, said Geraldine, she were ! 

But soon with altered voice, said she — 

' Off, wandering mother ! Peak and pine ! 205 

I have power to bid thee flee.' 

Alas ! what ails poor Geraldine ? 

Why stares she with unsettled eye ? 

Can she the bodiless dead espy ? 

And why with hollow voice cries she, 210 

' Off, woman, off ! this hour is mine — 

Though thou her guardian spirit be, 

Off, woman, off ! 'tis given to me.' 

Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, 

And raised to heaven her eyes so blue — 215 

Alas ! said she, this ghastly ride — 

Dear lady ! it hath wildered you ! 

The lady wiped her moist cold brow, 

And faintly said, i 'tis over now ! ' 

Again the wild-flower wine she drank : 220 

Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, 



CHRIST ABEL 49 

And from the floor whereon she sank, 



: 53 



The lofty lady stood upright : 
She was most beautiful to see, 
Like a lady of a far countree. 

And thus the lofty lady spake — 
' All they who live in the upper sky, 
Do love you, holy Christabel ! 
And you love them, and for their sake 
And for the good which me befel, 
Even I in my degree will try, 
Fair maiden, to requite you well. 
But now unrobe yourself ; for I 
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie.' 

Quoth Christabel, So let it be ! 235 

And as the lady bade, did she. 
Her gentle limbs did she undress, 
And° lay down in her loveliness. 

But through her brain of weal and woe 

So many thoughts moved to and fro, 240 

That vain it were her lids to close ; 

So half-way from the bed she rose, 

And on her elbow did recline 

To look at the lady Geraldine. 



50 CHRISTABEL 

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 245 

And slowly rolled her eyes around ; 

Then drawing in her breath aloud, 

Like one that shuddered, she unbound 

The cincture from beneath her breast : 

Her silken robe, and inner vest, 250 

Dropt to her feet, and full in view, 

Behold! her bosom and half her side 

A sight to dream of, not to tell ! 

O shield her ! shield sweet Christabel ! 

Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs ; 255 

Ah ! what a stricken look was hers ! 

Deep from within she seems half-way 

To lift some weight with sick assay, 

And eyes the maid and seeks delay ; 

Then suddenly, as one defied, 260 

Collects herself in scorn and pride, 

And lay down by the Maiden's side ! — 

And in her arms the maid she took, 

Ah wel-a-day ! 
And with low voice and doleful look 265 

These words did say : 

' In the touch of this bosom there worketh a 
spell, 



CHRIST ABEL 51 

Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel ! 
Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, 
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow ; 270 
But vainly thou warrest, 

For this is alone in 
Thy power to declare, 

That in the dim forest 
Thou heard'st a low moaning, 275 

And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair ; 
And didst bring her home with thee in love 

and in charity, 
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.' 



THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE FIRST 

It was a lovely sight to see 

The lady Christabel, when she 280 

Was praying at the old oak tree. 

Amid the jagged shadows, 

Of mossy leafless boughs, 

Kneeling in the moonlight, 

To make her gentle vows ; 285 

Her slender palms together prest, 
Heaving sometimes on her breast ; 



CHRISTABEL 

Her face resigned to bliss or bale — 

Her face, oh call it fair not pale, 

And both blue eyes more bright than clear, 290 

Each about to have a tear. 

With open eyes (ah woe is me !) 

Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, 

Fearfully dreaming, yet, T wis, 

Dreaming that alone, which is — 295 

O sorrow and shame ! Can this be she, 

The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree ? 

And lo ! the worker of these harms, 

That holds the maiden in her arms, 

Seems to slumber still and mild, 300 

As a mother with her child. 

A star hath set, a star hath risen, 

Geraldine ! since arms of thine 

Have been the lovely lady's prison. 

Geraldine ! one hour was thine — 305 

Thou'st had thy will ! By tairn and rill, 

The night birds all that hour were still. 

But now they are jubilant anew, 

From cliff and tower, tu — whoo ! tu — whoo ! 

Tu — whoo! tu — whoo! from wood and fell ! 110 



CHRISTABEL 53 

And see ! the lady Christabel 

Gathers herself from out her trance ; 

Her limbs relax, her countenance 

Grows sad and soft ; the smooth thin lids, 

Close o'er her eyes ; and tears she sheds — ■ 315 

Large tears that leave the lashes bright ! 

And oft the while she seems to smile 

As infants at a sudden light ! 

Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, 

Like a youthful hermitess, 320 

Beauteous in the wilderness, 

Who, praying always, prays in sleep. 

And, if she move unquietly, 

Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free 

Comes back and tingles in her feet. 325 

No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. 

What if her guardian spirit 'twere, 

What if she knew her mother near ? 

But this she knows, in joys and woes, 

That saints will aid if men will call: 330 

For the blue sky bends over all ! 



54 CHRISTABEL 



PART THE SECOND 



Each matin bell, the Baron saith, 

Knells us back to a world of death. 

These words Sir Leoline first said, 

When he rose and found his lady dead : 335 

These words Sir Leoline will say 

Many a morn to his dying day ! 

And hence the custom and law began 

That still at dawn the sacristan, 

Who duly pulls the heavy bell, 340 

Five and forty beads must tell 

Between each stroke — a warning knell, 

Which not a soul can choose but hear 

From Bratha Head to Wyndermere. 

Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell ! 345 

And let the drowsy sacristan 

Still count as slowly as he can ! 

There is no lack of such, I ween, 

As well fill up the space between. 

In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, 350 

And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, 

With ropes of rock and bells of air 



CHRIST ABEL 55 

Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, 

Who all give back, one after t'other, 

The death-note to their living brother ; 355 

And oft too, by the knell offended, 

Just as their one ! two ! three ! is ended, 

The devil mocks the doleful tale 

With a merry peal from Borrowdale. 

The air is still ! through mist and cloud 360 

That merry peal comes ringing loud ; 

And Geraldine shakes off her dread, 

And rises lightly from her bed ; 

Puts on her silken vestments white, 

And tricks her hair in lovely plight, 365 

And nothing doubting of her spell 

Awakens the lady Christabel. 

' Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel ? 

I trust that you have rested well/ 

And Christabel awoke and spied * 370 

The same who lay down by her side — 

O rather say, the same whom she 

Raised up beneath the old oak tree ! 

Nay, fairer yet ! and yet more fair ! 

For she belike hath drunken deep 375 



56 CHRISTABEL 

Of all the blessedness of sleep ! 

And while she spake, her looks, her air, 

Such gentle thankfulness declare, 

That (so it seemed) her girded vests 

Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. 380 

' Sure I have sinn'd ! ' said Christabel, 

' Now heaven be praised if all be well ! ' 

And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, 

Did she the lofty lady greet 

With such perplexity of mind 385 

As dreams too lively leave behind. 

So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed 

Her maiden limbs, and having prayed 

That He, Avho on the cross did groan, 

Might wash away her sins unknown, 390 

She forthwith led fair Geraldine 

To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. 

The lovely maid and lady tall 

Are pacing both into the hall, 

And pacing on through page and groom, 395 

Enter the Baron's presence-room. 

The Baron rose, and while he prest 
His gentle daughter to his breast, 



CHRIST ABEL 57 

With cheerful wonder in his eyes 

The lady Geraldine espies, 400 

And gave such welcome to the same 

As might beseem so bright a dame ! 

But when he heard the lady's tale, 

And when she told her father's name, 

Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, 405 

Murmuring o'er the name again, 

Lord Eoland de Vaux of Tryermaine ? 

Alas !° they had been friends in youth ; 

But whispering tongues can poison truth ; 

And constancy lives in realms above ; 410 

And life is thorny ; and youth is vain ; 

And to be wroth with one we love 

Doth work like madness in the brain. 

And thus it chanced, as I divine, 

With Eoland and Sir Leoline. 415 

Each spake words of high disdain 

And insult to his heart's best brother : 

They parted — ne'er to meet again ! 

But never either found another 

To free the hollow heart from paining — 420 

They stood aloof, the scars remaining, 



58 CHRIST ABEL 

Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; 

A dreary sea now flows between. 

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, 

Shall wholly do away, I ween, 425 

The marks of that which once hath been. 

Sir Leoline, a moment's space, 

Stood gazing on the damsel's face : 

And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine 

Came back upon his heart again. 430 

then the Baron forgot his age, 

His noble heart swelled high with rage ; 

He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side 

He would proclaim it far and wide, 

With trump and solemn heraldry, 435 

That they, who thus had wronged the dame 

Were base as spotted infamy ! 

' And if they dare deny the same, 

My herald shall appoint a week, 

And let the recreant traitors seek 44 o 

My tourney court — that there and then 

1 may dislodge their reptile souls 
From the bodies and forms of men ! ' 
He spake : his eye in lightning rolls ! 



CHRIST ABEL 59 

For the lady was ruthlessly seized ; and he 

kenned 445 

In the beautiful lady the child of his friend ! 

And now the tears were on his face, 

And fondly in his arms he took 

Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace, 

Prolonging it with joyous look. 450 

Which when she viewed, a vision fell 

Upon the soul of Christabel, 

The vision of fear, the touch and pain ! 

She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again — 

(Ah, woe is me ! Was it for thee, 455 

Thou gentle maid ! such sights to see ?) 

Again she saw that bosom old, 

Again she felt that bosom cold, 

And drew in her breath with a hissing sound : 

Whereat the Knight turned wildly round, 460 

And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid 

With eyes upraised, as one that prayed. 

The touch, the sight, had passed away, 

And in its stead that vision blest, 

Which comforted her after-rest, 465 

While in the lady's arms she lay, 



60 CHRIST ABEL 

Had put a rapture in her breast, 
And on her lips and o'er her eyes 
Spread smiles like light ! 

With new surprise, 
' What ails then my beloved child ? ' 470 

The Baron said. — His daughter mild 
Made answer, ' All will yet be well ! ' 
I ween, she had no power to tell 
Aught else : so mighty was the spell. 

Yet he, who saw this Geraldine, 475 

Had deemed her sure a thing divine. 

Such sorrow with such grace she blended, 

As if she feared she had offended 

Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid ! 

And with such lowly tones she prayed 480 

She might be sent without delay 

Home to her father's mansion. 

'Nay! 
Nay, by my soul ! ' said Leoline. 
•' Ho ! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine ! 
Go thou, with music sweet and loud, 485 

And take two steeds with trappings proud, 
And take the youth whom thou lov'st best 



CHRIST ABEL 61 

To bear thy harp, and learn thy song, 

And clothe you both in solemn vest, 

And over the mountains haste along, 49 o 

Lest wandering folk, that are abroad, 

Detain you on the valley road. 

' And when he has crossed the Irthing flood, 

My merry bard ! he hastes, he hastes 

Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood, 495 

And reaches soon that castle good 

Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes. 

1 Bard Bracy ! Bard Bracy ! your horses are fleet, 

Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, 

More loud than your horses' echoing feet ! 500 

And loud and loud to Lord Eoland call, 

Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall ! 

Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free — 

Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me. 

He bids thee come without delay 505 

With all thy numerous array ; 

And take thy lovely daughter home : 

And he will meet thee on the way 

With all his numerous array 

White with their panting palfreys' foam : 510 



62 t URISTABEL 

And, by mine honour ! I will say, 
That I repent me of the day 
When I spake words of fierce disdain 
To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine ! — 
For since that evil hour hath flown, 
Man} r a summer's sun hath shone ; 
Yet ne'er found I a friend again 
Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine.' 

The lady fell, and clasped his knees, 
Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing ; 
And Bracy replied, with faltering voice, 
His gracious hail on all bestowing ; 
' Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, 
Are sweeter than my harp can tell ; 
Yet might I gain a boon of thee, 
This day my journey should not be, 
So strange a dream hath come to me ; 
That I had vowed with music loud 
To clear yon wood from thing unblest, 
Warn'd by a vision in my rest ! 
For in my sleep I saw that dove, 
That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, 
And call'st by thy own daughter's name 
Sir Leoline ! I saw the same, 



515 



53° 



CHRIST ABEL 63 

Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, 535 

Among the green herbs in the forest alone. 

Which when I saw and when I heard, 

I wonder'd what might ail the bird ; 

For nothing near it could I see, 

Save the grass and green herbs underneath 

the old tree. i 540 

' And in my dream, methought, I went 

To search out what might there be found ; 

And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, 

That thus lay fluttering on the ground. 

I went and peered, and could descry 545 

No cause for her distressful cry ; 

But yet for her dear lady's sake 

I stooped, methought, the dove to take, 

When lo ! I saw a bright green snake 

Coiled around its wings and neck. 550 

Green as the herbs on which it couched, 

Close by the dove's its head it crouched ; 

And with the dove it heaves and stirs, 

Swelling its neck as she swelled hers ! 

I woke ; it was the midnight hour, 555 

The clock was echoing in the tower ; 

But though my slumber was gone by, 



64 CHRIST ABEL 

This dream it would not pass away — 

It seems to live upon my eye ! 

And thence I vowed this self-same day 560 

With music strong and saintly song 

To wander through the forest bare, 

Lest aught unholy loiter there.' 

Thus Bracy said : the Baron, the while, 

Half-listening heard him with a smile ; 565 

Then turned to Lady Geraldine, 

His eyes made up of wonder and love, 

And said in courtly accents fine, 

1 Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, 

With arms more strong than harp or song, 570 

Thy sire and I will crush the snake ! ' 

He kissed her forehead as he spake, 

And Geraldine in maiden wise 

Casting down her large bright eyes, 

With blushing cheek and courtesy fine 575 

She turned her from Sir Leoline ; 

Softly gathering up her train, 

That o'er her right arm fell again ; 

And folded her arms across her chest, 

And couched her head upon her breast, 580 

And looked askance at Christabel 

Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! 



CHRISTABEL 65 

°A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, 
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, 
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, 585 

And with somewhat of malice, and more of 

dread, 
At Christabel she look'd askance ! — 
One moment — and the sight was fled! 
But Christabel in dizzy trance 
Stumbling on the unsteady ground 590 

Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound ; 
And Geraldine again turned round, 
And like a thing, that sought relief, 
Full of wonder and full of grief, 
She rolled her large bright eyes divine 595 

Wildly on Sir Leoline. 

The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone, 

She nothing sees — no sight but one ! 

The maid, devoid of guile and sin, 

I know not how, in fearful wise, 600 

So deeply had she drunken in 

That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, 

That all her features were resigned 

To this sole image in her mind : 

And passively did imitate 605 



66 ('UK 1ST ABEL 

That look of dull and treacherous hate ! 
And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, 
Still picturing that look askance 
With forced unconscious sympathy 

Full before her father's view 610 

As far as such a look could be 
In eyes so innocent and blue ! 

And when the trance was o'er, the maid 

Paused awhile, and inly prayed : 

Then falling at the Baron's feet, 615 

' By my mother's soul do I entreat 

That thou this woman send away ! ' 

She said : and more she could not say : 

For what she knew she could not tell, 

O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. 620 

Why is thy cheek so wan and wild, 

Sir Leoline ? Thy only child 

Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride, 

So fair, so innocent, so mild ; 

The same, for whom thy lady died ! 625 

0, by the pangs of her dear mother 

Think thou no evil of thy child ! 

For her, and thee, and for no other, 

She prayed the moment ere she died, 

Prayed that the babe for whom she died, 630 



CHRIST A BEL 67 

Might prove lier clear lord's joy and pride ! 
That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled, 

Sir Leoline ! 
And wouldst thou wrong thy only child, 

Her child and thine ? 635 

Within the Baron's heart and brain 

If thoughts, like these, had any share, 

They only swelled his rage and pain, 

And did but work confusion there. 

His heart was cleft with pain and rage, 640 

His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild, 

Dishonour'd thus in his old age ; 

Dishonour'd by his only child, 

And all his hospitality 

To the insulted daughter of his friend 645 

By more than woman's jealousy 

Brought thus to a disgraceful end — 

He rolled his eye with stern regard 

Upon the gentle minstrel bard, 

And said in tones abrupt, austere — 650 

' Why, Bracy ! dost thou loiter here ? 

I bade thee hence ! ' The bard obeyed ; 

And turning from his own sweet maid, 

The aged knight, Sir Leoline, 

Led forth the lady Geraldine ! 655 



68 CHRIST ABEL 

THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE SECOND 

A° little child, a limber elf, 

Singing, dancing to itself, 

A fairy thing with red round cheeks, 

That always finds, and never seeks, 

Makes such a vision to the sight 660 

As fills a father's eyes with light ; 

And pleasures flow in so thick and fast 

Upon his heart, that he at last 

Must needs express his love's excess 

With words of unmeant bitterness. 665 

Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together 

Thoughts so all unlike each other ; 

To mutter and mock a broken charm, 

To dally with wrong that does no harm. 

Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty 670 

At each wild word to feel within 

A sweet recoil of love and pity. 

And what, if in a world of sin 

( sorrow and shame should this be true ! ) 

Such giddiness of heart and brain 675 

Comes seldom save from rage and pain, 

So talks as it's most used to do. 



NOTES 



THE ANCIENT MARINER 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first printed anony- 
mously in the Lyrical Ballads, 1798, and reprinted in subse- 
quent editions of that work in 1800, 1802, and 1805. The text 
of 1800 differed materially from that of 1798 in being freed 
from much of its archaic spelling — a device for making it 
appear more like the Sir Patrick Spens type of ballad, and in 
the omission of the merely horrible. On its next appearance, 
which was in 1817, in Sibylline Leaves, some additional changes 
in the text were made, and the motto from Burnet and the 
marginal gloss were added. After this there were no altera- 
tions of any consequence. 

In the Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Vol. I., pp. 107, 108, 
the following account of the origin of the poem is given by 
Wordsworth: "In the autumn of 1797 he (Coleridge), my 
sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the 
afternoon with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones 
near to it. Accordingly we set off. and proceeded along the 
Quantock Hills towards Watchet, and in the course of this walk 
was planned the poem of The Ancient Mariner, founded on a 
dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend, Mr. Cruikshank. 
Much the greater part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's inven- 
tion, but certain parts I suggested ; for example, some crime 

69 



70 • NOTES 

was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navi- 
gator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral 
persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wan- 
derings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages 1 a day or 
two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently 
saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, 
some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. ' Suppose,' 
said I, ' you represent him as having killed one of these birds 
on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these 
regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident 
was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I 
also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but 
do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme 
of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently ac- 
companied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at 
least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt 
it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition 
together on that, to me, memorable evening. I furnished two 
or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular : 

1 Shelvocke, in describing his voyage between " the streights of 
le Mair " and the coast of Chili, says they saw no fish," nor one sea- 
bird, except a disconsolate black Albitross, who accompanied us 
for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself, till 
Hartley (my second captain), observing in one of his melancholy 
tits that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin'd from his 
colour that it might be some ill-omen. That which, I suppose, 
induced him the more to encourage his superstition was the con- 
tinued series of contrary tempestuous winds, which had oppress'd 
us ever since we had got into this sea. But be that as it would, he 
after some fruitless attempts at length shot the albitross, not doubt- 
ing (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it." — Shel- 
vocke, Voyage round the World by the way of the great South 
Sea, etc., London, 1726. 



NOTES • 71 

' And listeu'd like a three years' child : 
The Mariner had his will.' 

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. Coleridge 
has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his 
mind, as they well might. As we endeavored to proceed con- 
jointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners 
proved so widely different that it would have been quite pre- 
sumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an under- 
taking upon which I could only have been a clog." 

In a conversation with the Rev. Alexander Dyce (Xote in 
Poems of S. T. C, ed. 1852) Wordsworth said the dream of 
Coleridge's friend was of "a skeleton ship, with figures in it," 
and claimed, besides the stanza containing the two lines quoted 
above, the lines : 

" And thou art long, and lank, and brown, 
As is the ribbed sea-sand." 

Coleridge's own account of the matter has been quoted in 
the Introduction. It has also been claimed that Coleridge must 
have derived some help from Captain Thomas James' Strange 
and dangerous Voyage . . . in his intended Discovery of the 
North- West Passage into the South Sea, London, 1633, and a 
document to be found in La Bigne's Magna Bibliotheca Vete- 
rum Patrum, 1018, — a letter from Saint Paulinus to Macarius. 
Regarding the latter see Gentleman'' s Magazine for October, 
1853. But whatever Coleridge's indebtedness to these sources, 
it should not be forgotten that he used this material as Shak- 
spere used the sources of his wonderful plays, — it was, after 
all, simply the skeleton which his imagination enabled him to 
clothe with living flesh and blood. 

Translation of Motto. — I can easily believe that in the uni- 
verse the invisible beings are more than the visible. But who 



72 NOTES 

shall reveal to us the nature of them all, the rank, the relation- 
ships, the distinguishing features, and the offices of each ? 
What is it they do ? Where is it they dwell ? Always about 
the knowledge of these wonders the mind of man has circled, 
nor ever reached it. In the meantime, I deny not, it is pleas- 
ant sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the 
image of this greater and better world ; that the intellect, 
wonted to the petty details of daily life, be not narrowed over- 
much, nor sink utterly to paltry thoughts. But, meanwhile, 
the truth must be vigilantly sought after, and a temperate 
judgment maintained, that we may distinguish things certain 
from things uncertain, day from night. 

The Glosses. — These marginal notes should be read both in 
connection with the poem and by themselves. If read with the 
text they will be found to give a clearer conception of the idea 
of the poem ; if read by themselves they will be seen to consti- 
tute one of Coleridge's finest prose compositions. See Pater, 
Appreciations, p. 100 ; Craik, English Prose, Vol. V., p. 79. 

1. 1. It is, etc. Note the rhetorical ellipsis, and for ballads 
beginning in a similar manner see Child, English and Scottish 
Popular Ballads, I., 113 ; II., 256, 321 ; V., 48, 54. The poem 
begins abruptly, and in like manner nearly every important 
detail and incident in the poem is introduced, as, for example, 
the ship, the storm-blast, the Albatross, etc. 

1. 2. One of three. Observe the poet's use of the numbers 
three, seven, and nine. "The odd numbers have always been 
regarded as particularly appropriate to the mystical or super- 
natural. See, for example, llossetti's Blessed Damozel: 

1 She had three lilies in her hand, 
And the stars in her hair were seven.' 

" Tennyson writes in the Hesperides : 



NOTES 73 

' . . . Five and three, 
Let it not be noised abroad, make an awful mystery.' 

"There are, you remember, nine muses, seven wonders of 
the world, three fates, etc." — Herbert Bates, ed. of Ancient 
Mariner. 

I. 3. By thy, etc. Much is gained by this indirect descrip- 
tion of the Ancient Mariner. Look through the poem for other 
examples of the same sort. 

II. 9-12. In the 1798 version there were two stanzas here : 

But still he holds the wedding-guest — 

There was a Ship, quoth he — 
" Nay, if thou'st got a laughsome tale, 

" Marinere ! come with me." 

He holds him with his skinny hand, 

Quoth he, there was a Ship — 
" Now get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon! 

" Or my Staff shall make thee skip." 

Other changes worth noting, not pointed out later, are the 
following: 41-54, 07, 85, 143-152, 159, 167, 234, 238, 242, 
268, 309, 313-326, 327-328, 345-349, 359, 387-388, 443, 533, 
583-585. 

1. 10. There was a ship. "It is perhaps the most vivid 
realization ever put into words of that large life of the world 
which embraces the tiny fragmentary life of the individual. 
The ship sails in upon the changed scene under the wondering 
gazer's unwilling eyes. Its shadow comes between him and 
the board which he knows is spread so near, the procession 
which he can see passing, shadowy, across those shadowy seas. 
Which is the real ? which the vision ? The mind grows giddy, 
the imagination trembles and wavers. Our senses become con- 



74 NOTES 

fused, unable to identify what we see from what we hear ; and 
finally, triumphantly, the unseen sweeps in and holds posses- 
sion, more real, more true, more unquestionable than anything 
that eye can see." — Mrs. Oliphant, BlackicoocV s Magazine, 
Vol. 110, p. 507. 

1. 11. Loon. Compare Macbeth, V. 3. 11. 

1. 12. Eftsoons. At once, immediately. Why "dropt" in 
this line, and '♦holds" in 1. 9 ? Examine the tenses through- 
out the poem, and try to discover just what the poet accom- 
plishes by his frequent changes. 

1.13. His glittering eye. " Like his own 'Ancient Mariner,' 
when he had once fixed your eye he held you spell-bound, and 
you were constrained to listen to his tale ; you must have been 
more powerful than he to have broken the charm ; and I know 
no man worthy to do that." — C. and M. C. Clarke, Becolle.c- 
tions of Writers, p. 32. For a somewhat similar comment by 
John Sterling, see Russell, Characteristics, p. 1G. 

I. 14. The Wedding-Guest. ''Mark . . . how significant is 
the pause which allows time to present the final relinquishment 
on the part of the wedding-guest of all thought of escape ; what- 
ever interruption he makes henceforth is in the interest of the 
narrative, and betrays its control over him ; he no longer seeks 
to retard or dismiss it." — Gertrude Garrigues, Journal of 
Spec. Phil., Vol. 14, p. 829. Examine those lines in which 
the wedding-guest is mentioned, and try to discover the poet's 
reason for introducing the character. 

II. 15-16. These lines, as well as lines 22G-227, were fur- 
nished by Wordsworth. 

1. 18. He cannot choose, etc. See 11. 38, 586-590. 

1. 20. Bright-eyed. A study of the epithets in the poem 



NOTES lb 

will give some insight into an important phase of Coleridge's 
poetic art. "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, 
to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagina- 
tion to produce the picture." — Coleridge, Lectures on JShak- 
spere and Milton (Bohn ed.), p. 138. In this connection, see 
Sherman, Analytics of Literature, p. 52 ff. ; on the general 
subject of Coleridge's diction, see Lowell, Works, Vol. VI., 
pp. 74-75. 

I. 21. The ship, etc. This stanza should be compared with 
"the opening stanzas of Tennyson's The Voyage; indeed the 
whole of that poem shows Coleridge's influence." — Syle, From 
Milton to Tennyson. 

II. 25-28. A whole clay — and it is all sun, just what a sailor 
would see so much of at sea — is crowded into these four lines. 
This economy of words, but not of ideas, because Coleridge's 
well-chosen words are almost without limit in their suggestive- 
ness, is characteristic of the whole poem, and, we might add, 
of all works of the highest art. Another feature of the stanza 
is that, with the exception of the two prepositions, upon and 
into, all of the words are monosyllables. An interesting study 
will be to compare this stanza, and others like it, with those 
in which words of more than one syllable abound, noting the 
difference of effect. See also the monosyllabic song at the 
opening of Part VII. of Tennyson's Princess. 

The whole picture is a "grand image of the loneliness, the 
isolation from all other created things, of that speck upon the 
boundless, noiseless waters. Throughout the whole poem this 
sentiment of isolation is preserved with a magical and most 
impressive reality ; all the action is absolutely shut up within the 
doomed ship." — Mrs. Oliphant, Literary History of England, 
Vol. I., p. 247. 



76 NOTES 

1. 30. Where, then, is the ship ? Observe that only ten 
lines have been used in bringing the ship to this point. 

1. 31. Here we are suddenly torn away from the sea picture, 
and borne back to the wedding-feast where the bride and the 
minstrelsy fill our minds with thoughts quite different from 
those that haunt the crazed brain of the old seafarer. When 
we are again at sea, it is not upon the sun or the ship that our 
attention is centred, but upon the Storm-blast, and in this way 
surprise and contrast are made use of to sting our imaginations 
into producing the picture. 

1. 32. Bassoon. " During Coleridge's residence in Stowey 
his friend Poole reformed the church choir, and added a bassoon 
to its resources. Mrs. Sanford (T. Poole and His Friends, I., 
247), happily suggests, that this ' was the very original and pro- 
totype of the " loud bassoon " whose sound moved the wedding- 
guest to beat his breast.' " — Campbell, Poetic Works of 
Coleridge. See illustration in Standard Dictionary. 

1. 35. Nodding their heads. Compare Coleridge's Ballad 
of the Dark Ladle, 11. 53-56. 

1. 36. Minstrelsy. Define. 

1. 37. The Wedding-Guest, etc. What does the poet gain 
by his frequent repetitions, not only here, but elsewhpre in the 
poem? Not infrequently much of a poet's charm lies in his' 
skilful repetitions, a fact that will be appreciated by all readers 
of Poe. 

1. 41. The ship drawn, etc. Mr. Campbell suggests that 
drawn in the gloss be emended to driven. His reasons for the 
change will be found in The Athenceum, No. 3256, p. 371, and 
in a note at p. 597 of his edition of Coleridge's poems. For a de- 
fence of the present reading, see The Athenaeum, No. 3257, p. 405. 



NOTES 11 

1. 47. Still treads, etc. Explain this line. 

I. 50. Southward aye we fled. "Anyone examining the 
poem with a critical eye for its machinery and groundwork, 
will have noticed that Coleridge is careful not to introduce any 
element of the marvellous or supernatural until he has trans- 
ported the reader beyond the pale of definite geographical know- 
ledge, and thus left behind him all those conditions of the known 
and the familiar, all those associations with recorded fact and 
experience, which would have created an inimical atmosphere. 
... In some half-dozen stanzas, beginning with ' The ship 
was cleared,' we find ourselves crossing the Line and driven far 
towards the Southern Pole. Beyond a few broad indications 
thus vouchsafed, Coleridge very astutely takes pains to avoid 
anything like geography. We reach that silent sea into which 
we are the first that ever burst, and that is sufficient for imagina- 
tive ends. It is enough that the world, as known to actual 
navigators, is left behind, and a world which the poet is free 
to colonize with the wildest children of his dreaming brain, has 
been entered. Forthwith, to all intents and purposes, we may 
say, in the words of Goethe as rendered by Shelley : 

' The bounds of true and false are passed ; — 
Lead us on, thou wandering gleam.' " 

— Watson, Excursions in Criticism, pp. 98-99. 

II. 51-70. And now there came, etc. " If Coleridge read 
Captain James' 'North-west Passage' log, he probably noted 
the following entries. ... 'All day and all night, it snow'd 
hard ' ; ' The nights are very cold ; so that our rigging freezes ' ; 
• It prooved very thicke foule weather, and the next day, by two 
a Clocke in the morning, we found ourselves incompassed about 
with Ice ' ; ' We had Ice not farre off about us, and some pieces 
as high as our Top-mast-head'; 'The seventeenth ... we 



78 NOTES 

heard . . . the rutt against a banke of Ice that lay on the 
Shoare. It made a hollow and hideous noyse, like an over-fall 
of water, which made us to reason amongst our selves con- 
cerning it, for we were not able to see about us, it being darke 
night and foggie ' ; ' The Ice . . . crackt all over the Bay, 
with a fearf nil noyse ' ; ' These great pieces that came a grounde 
began to breake with a most terrible thundering noyse ' ; ' This 
morning . . . we unfastened our Ship, and came to Saile, 
steering betwixt great pieces of Ice that were a grounde in 
40 fad., and twice as high as our Top-mast-head.' " — Campbell. 
See Hie Athenceum for 1890. 

1. 51. And through, etc. Clifts is an old form of clefts; 
drifts is used in the sense of driving clouds of mist and snow 
(see 1. 51). 

1. 59. The ice, etc. " In the beginning of the mariner's 
narrative, the language has all the impetus of a storm, — and 
when the ship is suddenly locked among the polar ice, the 
change is as instantaneous as it is awful.'" — Blackwood' 1 s 
Magazine, Vol. 6, p. 5. 

1. G2. Like noises, etc. Swound = swoon. What could 
have been "more weirdly imagined of the 'cracks and growls' 
of the rending iceberg than that they sounded 'like noises in a 
swound ' ? " — Traill, Coleridge, p. 52. Observe also the effect 
of remoteness produced by this comparison. 

1. 61. Thorough. An older form of through, used here for 
the sake of the metre. But why are so many archaic forms 
found in the poem? Make a list of them and then consult some 
good dictionary for their -meanings. 

1. 69. Thunder-fit. A noise like thunder ; the word fit is 
derived from the Anglo-Saxon Jitt, which meant struggle. 



NOTES 79 

1. 74. Mariner's. Some editions read mariners', as in 1. 90. 

1. 75. Shroud. See illustration in Standard Dictionary. 

1. 76. Vespers. Evenings. 

1. 79. God save thee, etc. Observe how the speech of the 
Wedding-Guest increases the effect upon us of the Mariner's 
confession. We are beginning to understand why this char- 
acter was introduced. 

1. 82. I shot the Albatross. "... the old man shrinks 
from that avowal of his offence which he yet knows he must 
make. He lingers and lingers on his description of the Alba- 
tross, and of its growing familiarity with the sailors, and goes 
on adding circumstance to circumstance, each of which is an 
aggravation of the deed, but which serves to postpone his 
acknowledgement of it, till at last it is elicited by a demand 
of the cause of his obvious agony, and then it bursts from him 
in the fewest words that could express the fact," — Westminster 
Beview, Vol. 12., p. 29. "All the subsequent miseries of the 
crew are represented by the poet as having been the conse- 
quences of this violation of the charities of sentiment." — 
Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 6, p. 6. 

1. 83. Although this stanza is varied but slightly from that 
at 1. 25, it should be so read as to indicate clearly the change 
in the course the ship is now taking. See what Lowell says 
about being alone with the sun at sea. Works (Houghton), 
Vol. I., p. 105. 

1. 90. Mariners'. Both here and in 1. 7-4 the 1798 version 
has the singular, Marinere's. Notice that the rhyme (follow: 
hollo) produces the effect of an echo. Eind other passages 
where the rhymes are in like manner especially appropriate. 

1. 97. Like God's own head. This phrase modifies Sun ; 



80 NOTES 

a construction that may be shown in reading the passage aioud 
if a brief pause is made after red. Dowden makes the follow- 
ing comment : "How majestically the sunrise at sea is expressed. 
... It is like the solemn apparition of one of the chief actors 
in this strange drama of crime, and agony, and expiation, and 
in the new sense of wonder with which we witness that oldest 
spectacle of the heavens we can well believe in other miracles." 

— New Studies in Literature, p. 343. 

1.104. The furrow followed free. In Sibylline Leaves (1817) 
the line was printed : 

"The furrow stream'd off free," 

and Coleridge added in a foot-note : "In the former edition the 
line was — 

' The furrow follow'd free ' ; 

but I had not been long on board a ship before I perceived that 
this was the image as seen by a spectator from the shore, or 
from another vessel. From the ship itself the Wake appears 
like a brook flowing off from the stern. 1 ' But in 1828 he 
restored the old line, because, after all, it seemed to him more 
musical. See Dowden, New Studies in Literature, p. 338, and 
Brandl, Coleridge and the English Romantic Movement, p. 201. 

1. 105-106. Contrast the movement of these lines with that 
of the two following. 

1. 111. All in a hot, etc. This "reminds one of some of 
Turner's pictures. This great artist, as well as Coleridge, had 
a keen eye for the subtle aspects of nature that hard and brill- 
iant minds like Macaulay's find so uninteresting. For similnr 
touches see 11. 171-180, 199-200, 263-271, 314-326, 368-372." 

— Stle. How do vou account for the size of the sun '? 



NOTES 81 

1. 117. Coleridge here suggests one of the limitations of 

painting. See Lessing's Lnocoon, §§ XV., XVI. ff. Hales 

compares Hamlet, II. 2. 502. 

1. 127. About, etc. See Macbeth, I. 3. 33. 

I. 128. The death-fires, etc. See fetch-candle, corposant, in 
some dictionary ; also Brand's Popular Antiquities. 

II. 129-130. The water, etc. See 11. 270-271. The spirit 
of these lines is easily caught by a reader familiar with the 
famous Witch Scene in Macbeth, IV. 1. See Blackwood'' s 
Magazine, Vol. 0, p. 6. 

1. 138. The slow movement of this line adds to the effect of 
the figure. It should be noted that an important feature of 
Coleridge's work, whether in prose or verse, is the naturalness 
and appropriateness of his figures. These are everywhere so 
exceedingly apt that we never think that any other than the 
one he has chosen would have quite suited his purpose, — in- 
deed, they fit so well into his work that we scarcely ever think 
of them as mere figures of rhetoric. Not infrequently he takes 
the most prosaic idea, and, by his exquisite placing of it, at once 
elevates it into the realm of poetry. 

1. 139. Well-a-day. Define. 

1. 141. Instead of the cross. Compare the following lines: 
76, 178, 233-234, 286, 294-296, 489, 574-575, 595-596. In read- 
ing this line be careful not to stress the last syllable of Albatross 
too strongly ; nowhere in the poem, indeed, should too much 
be made of the rhymes. 

1. 142. " I do not think that Coleridge could have known the 
size cf the fowl when he caused it to be hung round the neck 
of his Ancient Mariner. 1 ' — Hawthorne, Works, Vol. VIII., 
p. 557. See article on Albatross, Encyclopcedia Britannica. 



82 NOTES 

1. 152. A certain shape, etc. See Brandl, Coleridge and 
English Romantic Movement, pp. 197-198. 

I wist. Wist is the preterit of wite, to know. For instances 
of the use of this form in the old ballads see Child, Ballads 

(Glossary). 

1. 153. A speck, etc. Here the Mariner becomes oblivious to 
all but the scene in his mind's eye, and wanders with dreamy 
thought over the moving picture he has described — builds, as 
it were, " a bridge from Dreamland for his lay." Then, after 
a pause, he regains sufficient presence of mind to go on with the 
story, which he takes up in the next line. 

1. 157. Black lips baked. Observe the appropriateness of 
the labials. 

1. 164. They for joy did grin. " I took the thought of ' grin- 
ning for joy ' . . . from my companion's remark to me when we 
had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with 
thirst. We could not speak from the constriction till we found 
a little puddle under a stone. He said to me, ' You grinned like 
an idiot !' He had done the same." — Table-Talk, May 31, 
1830. See Letters of S. T. Coleridge, I., p. 81, note. 

1. 168. Hither, etc. This, the last of his speech to his com- 
panions, is broken off by the amazement which takes from him 
all power of speech, — so overcome is he by the realization of 
the fact that the ship moves without breeze or tide. The latter 
fact suggests the legend of the "Flying Dutchman." 

1. 175. That strange shape. " Fancies of the strange things 
which may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men 
shut up alone in ships far off at sea, seem to have arisen in the 
human mind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often 
have about them the fascination of a certain dreamy grace, 



NOTES 83 

which distinguishes them from other kinds of marvellous in- 
ventions. This sort of fascination the Ancient Mariner brings 
to its highest degree ; it is the delicacy, the dreamy grace in 
his presentation of the marvellous, that makes Coleridge's work 
so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from the spirit 
world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare 
even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness. Coleridge's 
power is in the very fineness with which, as with some really 
ghostly finger, he brings home to our inmost sense his inven- 
tions, daring as they are — the skeleton ship, the polar spirit, 
the inspiriting of the dead bodies of the ship's crew. The Bime 
of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility, the perfect adapta- 
tion to reason and the general aspect of life, which belong to 
the marvellous when actually presented as part of a credible 
experience in our dreams." — Fater, Ward's English Poets. 
See Dixon, English Poetry, p. 80. 

Drove. What is the effect produced by the use of this word ? 
Compare 11. 22, 105, 199, 200, 201, etc. 

1. 177. And straight the Sun, etc. See Hazlitt, Sketches and 
Essays (Bonn edition), p. 274. 

I. 181. Gossameres. Look up derivation of word. 

II. 185-213. On 185-189 see Campbell's note. In the 1798 
version lines 185-213 read as follows : 

Are those her naked ribs, which fleck 'd 

The sun that did behind them peer ? 
And are those two all, all the crew, 

That woman and her fleshless Pheere ? 

His bones were black with many a crack, 

All black and bare, I ween ; 
Jet-black and bare, save where with rust 
Of mouldy damps and charnel crust 

They're patch'd with purple and green. 



84 NOTES 

Her lips are red, her looks are free, 

Her locks are yellow as gold : 
Her skin is as white as leprosy, 
And she is far liker Death than he ; 

The flesh makes the still air cold. 

The naked Hnlk alongside came 

And the Twain were playing dice ; 
" The Game is done ! I've won, I've won ! " 

Quoth she, and whistled thrice. 

A gust of wind sterte up hehind 

And whistled thro' his bones; 
Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth 

Half-whistles and half-groans. 

With never a whisper in the Sea 

Off darts the Spectre-ship ; 
While clomhe above the Eastern bar 
The horned Moon, with one bright Star 

Almost atween the tips. 

One after one by the horned Moon 
(Listen, O Stranger! to me). 

1. 188. Is that a Death ? Compare other pictures of Death 
in poetry, notably Milton's in Paradise Lost, II., 666-073. See 
also Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspere (Bohn edition), pp. 
90-91, for a comment on Milton's description which applies 
almost equally well to the present passage. In the first edition 
there was a stanza describing Death which Coleridge finally 
omitted, thus rejecting " from his work the horrors, while re- 
taining the terrors, of death " (Swinburne). " Relying largely, 
as he did in his poems which deal with the supernatural, on 
the effect produced by their psychological truth, Coleridge 
could afford to subdue the supernatural, and refine it to the 
utmost. ... he did not need, as Monk Lewis did, to drag into 



NOTES 85 

his verse all the horrors of the churchyard and the nether pit of 
Hell. . . . [In this instance he] felt that these hideous inci- 
dents of the grave only detracted from the finer horror of the 
voluptuous beauty of his White Devil, the nightmare Life-in- 
Death. . . . She it was, this Life-in-Death, who with her 
numbing spell haunted Coleridge himself in after days." — 
Dowdex, New Studies in Literature, pp. 338-340. 

1. 193. Night-mare. Look up meaning of second part of 
compound. 

I. 197. The game is done, etc. For illustration see Dora's 
edition of the poem, and on the impossibility of illustrating 
the poem effectively see Johnson's Three Americans and Three 
Englishmen, pp. 49-51. It is important to note the effect upon 
the Ancient Mariner of Life-in-Death, and how easily her pos- 
session of him explains the events to happen later on. 

I've won, etc. So most editions ; the 1829 text reads I've, 
I've won. 

II. 199-202. This stanza has been much admired. See 
Traill, Coleridge, p. 52; Lowell, Works, Vol. VI, p. 74. How 
is the effect of rapidity produced ? What is meant in the gloss 
by " the courts of the Sun " ? 

11. 201-211. For a recast of these lines, which was found 
among some papers of Coleridge dated 1806, 1807, and 1810, 
see Campbell's note. 

1. 203. Looked sideways up. Observe how delicately Cole- 
ridge has suggested the fear of these men, and how much 
stronger suggestion is than statement. 

1. 209. Bar. Define. 

1. 211. Within the nether tip. "It is a common supersti- 
tion among sailors that something evil is about to happen when- 



86 NOTES 

ever a star dogs the moon." — Coleridge, in MS. note. " But 
no sailor ever saw a star within the nether tip of a horned moon." 
— Campbell. Hunt out other passages in poetry where the 
moon is alluded to or described. 

I. 218. With heavy thump. The rhyme in this line has been 
criticised as sounding "to a modern ear undignified," but the 
words thump, lump, with what assistance they get from the 
next line, suggest to the ear the sound of the falling bodies. 

1.223. My cross-bow. "The use of the cross-bow fixes 
the date of the Ancient Mariner's supposed life in or before the 
sixteenth century. The cross-bow, or arbalest, was not used 
in England after the reign of Henry VIII." — Twombly, edition 
of Ancient Mariner. What else does the line suggest, and 
what is gained by an allusion to it at the end of each Part ? 

II. 226-227. And thou, etc. See note to 11. 15-16. 

1.234. Never a saint. "A here has its older force; it 
= one, a single." — Hales, Longer English Poems. 

11. 236-237. The many men, etc. See De Quincey's Works 
(Masson), III., p. 43, for Lamb's ungenerous remark about 
these lines. 

1. 239. And so did I. What is gained by the association ? 

1. 215. Or ever : before ever. See Hales, Longer English 
Poems, p. 210. 

1. 250. " The long-drawn third line gives an impression of 
weariness, which is increased by retarding the stanza with an 
extra line and rhyme- word.'' — Moody, ed. of Ancient Marino-. 

1. 260. Is a curse, etc. It will be interesting for the student 
hereafter to observe the curses mentioned elsewhere in litera- 
ture. See Macbeth, II. 2. 36-37 ; Lady of the Lake (Rolfe's 
edition) III., 191, note. 



NOTES 87 

11. 263-266. " Notice the contrast between the beauty of this 
stanza and the horrors of the narrative." — Gibbs, ed. of A ncient 
Mariner. 

1. 271. " I read this description of the ship in moonlight at 
sea, in a tropic calm. The beauty of the illustration of the 
frost is equalled by its truth, the motion of the moon is almost 
heard in the verse, and yet the whole is a finished picture. . . . 
But Coleridge is uncontent to leave the description of the sky 
without throwing round it the light of the higher imagination, 
and it is characteristic of the quaint fantasy which belonged 
to his nature that he puts the thoughts which lift the whole 
scene into the realm of the imagination into the prose gloss at 
the side — and it is perhaps the loveliest little thought in all 
his writings." — Brooke, Theology in the English Poets, pp. 
88-89. 

1. 272. Beyond, etc. Perhaps the nearest approach in nature 
to the phenomenon described by Coleridge is "the trail of a shoal 
of fish through the phosphorescent water," which Lowell says is 
the most beautiful thing he ever saw at sea. See Lowell, Works, 
I., pp. 103-104 ; also, Letters of S. T. Coleridge, I., p. 260. 

1. 277. Within, etc. Contrast this picture with the one in 
the preceding stanza. 

1. 281. " Nor are his strange creatures of the sea those 
hideous worms which a vulgar dealer in the supernatural might 
have invented. Seen in a great calm by the light of the moon 
these creatures of God are beautiful in the joy of their life. . . . 
And it is through a sudden welling forth of sympathy with 
their happiness, and a sudden sense of their beauty, that the 
spell which binds the afflicted mariner is snapped. That 
one self-centred in crude egoism should be purified and con- 
verted through a new sympathy with suffering and sorrow is a 



88 NOTES 

common piece of morality ; this purification through sympathy 
with joy is a piece of finer and higher doctrine." — Dowden, 
New Studies in Literature, p. 341. 

1. 290. The Albatross fell off. What similar to this happens 
in Pilgrim' 1 s Progress f 

1. 291. The last two stanzas may be said to contain the 
principle of the poem, — here the climax is reached. 

1. 292. Oh sleep ! etc. " I have heard Rossetti say that what 
came most of all uppermost in Coleridge was his wonderful 
intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, 
and break, and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechan- 
ism of his verse. Sleep, too, Rossetti thought, had given up to 
Coleridge her utmost secrets ; and perhaps it was partly due 
to his own sad experience of the dread curse of insomnia, as 
well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, that tears so 
frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he 
recited [this stanza] — affirming, meantime, that nothing so 
simple and touching had ever been written on the subject.' 1 — 
Caixe, Recollections of I). G. Rossetti, pp. 164-165. If the 
latter were true it would indeed be no mean tribute to the pres- 
ent passage, since the subject has occupied the mind of nearly 
every poet who has ever lived. See Macbeth, II. 2. 37-41 ; 
2 Henry IV., III. 1. 5-31; Keats' Endymion, I., 453-463; 
Coleridge's The Pains of Sleep, etc. 

1. 297. Silly : empty, useless. The word has an interesting 
history. 

I. 308. A blessed ghost. " A blessed ghost, as opposed to a 
lost, damned ghost ; or a blessed ghost, as opposed to a very 
miserable living man." — Herbert Bates. 

II. 318-326, 367-372. On the singular charm of the images 



NOTES 89 

in these two passages see Brooke, Theology of English Poets, 
p. 90. 

11. 324-32G. Like waters, etc. Coleridge's description of 
the lightning falling 

" with never a jag, 
A river steep and wide," 

though contrary to the popular conception, which represents the 
lightning as zig-zagged and raw-edged, is nevertheless true to 
nature. In his Nature for Its Oton Sake, p. 94, Prof. Van 
Dyke says that the lightning " runs in streams and rivulets, and 
when seen in photograph it often looks like an outlined map of 
the Nile, with its many mouths leading to the Mediterranean." 

1. 344. For a comment on certain similar phenomena see 
Kolines, Pages from an Old Volume of Life, Works, Vol. 
VIII., pp. 201-202. 

1. 352. The spirits in the bodies, and not the bodies them- 
selves, sing. 

I. 359. I heard the sky-lark. Read Shelley's and Words- 
worth's odes To a Skylark. See Keeler's and Davis' Studies 
in English Composition, p. 79. In reading the last line of this 
stanza do not stress the last syllable oijargoning, but pronounce 
it lightly and observe the effect. 

II. 3(>7-372. These lines prove that for certain effects lan- 
guage is superior to both painting and sculpture. Explain. 
Are there any other similar instances in the poem ? 

1. 372. In the 1798 version four stanzas followed 1. 371 : 

Listen, O listen, thou Wedding-guest! 

• : Marinere ! thou hast thy will : 
" For that, which comes out of thine eye, doth make 

" My body and soul to be still." 



90 NOTES 

Never sadder tale was told 

To a man of woman born : 
Sadder and wiser than wedding-guest ! 

Thou'lt rise to-morrow morn. 

Never sadder tale was heard 

By a man of woman born : 
The Marineres all return 'd to work 

As silent as beforne. 

The Marineres all 'gau pull the ropes, 

Bat look at me they n'old: 
Though I, I am as thin as air — 

They cannot me behold. 

1.383. The Sun, etc. "The ship has now reached the 
equator, returning north. In line 30 she is represented as 
having crossed the line, going south. In Coleridge's prose 
comment, on 11. 103-10(3, he represents the ship, at that point 
of the narratice, as having reached the line, going north. But 
this is contradicted by 11. 328, 335, 367-3G8, 373-376, all of 
which imply a sailing north from the point reached in 107." 
— Syle. 

1. 385. But in a minute, etc. See Christian Examiner, Vol. 
14, p. 114. 

1. 395. My living life. As contrasted with his present life- 
in-death. 

I. 407. As soft, etc. See Kubla Khan, 52-53, lines that 
have been applied to Coleridge himself. How do the lines that 
follow aid in showing that " The other was a softer voice " ? 

II. 414-417. Still as a slave, etc. For sources of these 
lines see The Athenaeum, Xo. 325(5, pp. 371-372. 

11. 422-429. If Coleridge read James' Voyage., the latter 



NOTES 91 

part of the following passage may have helped in the invention 
of Part VI. of his poem : " What hath been long agoe fabled by 
some Portingaies, that should have comne this way out of the 
South Sea : the nieere shaddowes of whose mistaken Relations 
have comne to us : I leave to be confuted by their owne vanitie. 
These hopes have stirred up, from time to time, the more active 
spirits of this our kingdome, to research that meerely imaginary 
passage. For mine owne part, I give no credit to them at all ; 
and as little to the vicious, and abusive wits of later Portingals 
and Spaniards ■. who never speake of any difficulties : as shoalde 
water, Ice, nor sight of land: but as if the;/ had been brought 
home in a dreame or engine' 1 '' (p. 107). See gloss at line 422 ; 
also Athenceum, March 15, 1890, quoted in Campbell's note. 

1. 428. Slow and slow. Why ? 

1. 429. See 1. 391-392. 

I. 443. The ocean green. " Is the ocean actually green by 
moonlight ? " — Herbert Bates. 

II. 440-451. Like one, etc. " This stanza introduces us into 
the realm of the supernatural much as does Shakespeare's 
Macbeth. It takes us to the primeval imagination as it created 
the spirits of good and evil which wait on man to reward or 
to punish. Mr. Stopford Brooke says: 'I never met a sailor 
whose ship had been among the lonely places of the sea who did 
not know of these hauntings.' . . . In these days of utilitarianism, 
when we are taught that it is more important to know the law 
of the suction-pump than to know Hamlet, it is well to get back 
to the great principle which underlies such art as the Ancient 
Mariner, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Faust, 
The Prometheus of iEschylus. and the Book of Job." — Geokge, 
edition of Ancient Mariner. See Dixon, English Poetry, p. 82. 



92 NOTES 

I. 455. In ripple or in shade. " Visible either by a ripple or 
by a belt of darker water. But is breeze on moonlit water 
dark? 11 — Herbert Bates. 

II. 465-466. See 11. 23-24. 

1. 470. let me, etc. What is the meaning of his prayer ? 

I. 475. In the 1798 version these stanzas followed this line : 

The moonlight bay was white all o'er, 

Till rising from the same, 
Full many shapes, that shadows were, 

Like as of torches came. 

A little distance from the prow 

Those dark-red shadows were ; 
But soon I saw that my own flesh 

Was red as in a glare. 

I turn'd my head in fear and dread, 

And by the holy rood, 
The bodies had advanc'd, and now 

Before the mast they stood. 

They lifted up their stiff right arms, 

They held them strait and tight ; 
And each right arm burnt like a torch, 

A torch that's borne upright. 
Their stony eyeballs glitter'd on 

In the red and smoky light. 

I pray'd and turn'd my head away 

Forth looking as before. 
There was no breeze upon the bay, 

No wave against the shore. 

II. 478-470. The moonlight, etc. "... how pleasantly, 
how reassuringly, the whole nightmare story itself is made to 
end, among the clear fresh sounds and lights of the bay, where 
it began.' 1 — Pater, Appreciations, p. 101. 



NOTES 93 

1. 482. Full many shapes, etc. Can you account for these 
shapes, — their color and their location ? 

1. 503. In the 1798 version the following stanza appeared 
after this line : 

" Then vanish'd all the lovely lights; 

The bodies rose anew: 
With silent pace, each to his place, 

Came back the ghastly crew. 
The wind, that shade nor motion made, 

On me alone it blew." 

Campbell notes that "the Editor of 1877-1880 says that in a 
copy of 1798 Coleridge put his pen through the stanza and 
wrote on the margin : 

" Then vanish'd all the lovely lights, 
The spirits of the air, 
No souls of mortal men were they, 
But spirits bright and fair." 

1. 520. He hath, etc. Just why does this line add so much 
to our appreciation of the two following lines ? From what the 
Hermit says and from what is said about him, what can you 
judge as to his character ? Does he differ at all from the 
hermits you have read <about ? 

1. 535. Ivy-tod. Ivy-bush. 

1. 519. The ship went down, etc. For a criticism upon the 
sinking of the vessel see Quarterly Beview, Vol. 52, pp. 28, 29. 

1. 5G0. The Pilot shrieked. " With what consummate art are 
we left to imagine the physical traces which the mariner's long 
agony has left behind it by a method far more terrible than any 
direct description — the effect, namely, which the sight of him 
produces upon others." — Traill, Coleridge, p. 52. Why, by 



94 XOTES 

the way, is this effect greater upon the Pilot and his boy than 
upon the Hermit ? 

1. 505. Who now doth crazy go. On insanity caused by sud- 
den fright see Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy, Works, VII., p. 91. 

I. 58(5. I pass, like night, etc. This recalls the legend of 
the Wandering Jew. 

1.591. What loud uproar, etc. "Notice with what dra- 
matic skill this poem is set. The mariner's tale — gloomy, 
weird, supernatural — stands out in compelling contrast against 
the scenery of the bridal — cheerful, domestic, humanistic. If 
you look especially at the marvellous way in which the super- 
natural element is introduced, you will perhaps agree with me 
that no poet— not even the mighty Shakespeare himself — has 
so brought home to us those spiritual existences which, to a 
devout mind, attend our every movement and preserve our 
going out and our coming in." — Syle. 

II. 612-613. He prayeth well, etc. "The Poem illustrates 
. . . the personal, simple religion of Coleridge. We see in it 
how childlike the philosophic man could be in his faith, how 
little was enough for him. Its religion is all contained in [these 
lines]." — Brooke, Theology in English Poets, p. 90. "Mrs. 
Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner 
very much, but that there were two faults in it, — it was im- 
probable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned 
that that might admit some question ; but as to the want of a 
moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too 
much ; and that the only, or chief, fault, if I might say so, was 
the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader 
as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagi- 
nation. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian 
Nights tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the 



NOTES 95 

side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo ! a genie 
starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because 
one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the 
genie's son." — Table-Talk, May 31, 1830. For some attempts 
to "interpret" the poem see Johnson, Three Americans and 
Three Englishmen, p. 48 ; Gertrude Garrigues, Journal of 
Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 14, p. 329 ff. ; North American 
Review, Vol. 39, pp. 451, 452 ; I)e Quincey, The Spanish Nun, 
Works (Masson), Vol. xiii., pp. 195-196. 

Conclusion. — "The conclusion has always appeared to us 
to be happy and graceful in the utmost degree. The actual 
surface-life of the world is brought close into contact with the 
life of sentiment, — the soul that is as much alive, and enjoys, 
and suffers as much in dreams and visions of the night as by 
daylight, One feels with what a heavy eye the Ancient Mari- 
ner must look and listen to the pomps and merry-makings — 
even to the innocent enjoyments — of those whose experience 
has only been of things tangible. One feels that to him another 
world — we do not mean a supernatural, but a more exqui- 
sitely and deeply natural, world — has been revealed, — and 
that the repose of his spirit can only be in the contemplation of 
things that are not to pass away. The sad and solemn indiffer- 
ence of his mood is communicated to his hearer, — and we feel 
that even after reading what he has heard, it were better to 
' turn from the bridegroom's door.' " — Blackwood? s Magazine, 
Vol. 6, p. 7. " It brings our feet back to the common soil with 
a bewildered sweetness of relief and gentle quiet after the pro- 
digious strain of mental excitement, which is like nothing else 
we remember in poetry. The effect is one of those which only 
supreme genius could produce, — genius which dares to sink 
from the highest notes of spiritual music to the absolute sim- 
plicity of exhausted nature. Thus we are set down on the soft 



96 NOTES 

grass, in a tender bewilderment, out of the clouds. It is over, 
this visionary voyage — we are back again on the mortal soil 
from whence we started ; but never more, never again, can the 
visible and the invisible have to us the same meaning. For 
once in our lives, if never before, we have crossed the borders 
of the unseen.' 1 — Mrs. Oliphant, Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 
110, p. 509. 

KUBLA KHAN 

This poem was written in 1798, 1 but not published until 1810. 
It was then issued in a pamphlet containing Christabel and The 
Pains of Sleep, and preceeded by this note : 

" The following fragment is here published at the request of 
a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author's 
own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity 
than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.' 1 

"In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then <m ill 
health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and 
Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. 
In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been 
prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair 
at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or 
words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage : 'Here 
the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately 
garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground was 
inclosed with a wall. 12 The author continued for about three 

1 It would seem that the poem was written in 179S, and not, as 
Coleridge himself says, "in the summer of the year 1797." For a 
discussion of the matter see Letters of S. T. Coleridge, Vol. I., 
p. 245, note. 

2 " In Xamdu did Cuhlai Can build a stately Palace, encompass- 
ing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile 



NOTES 97 

hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, dur- 
ing which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could 
not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines ; 
if that indeed can he called composition in which all the images 
rose up before him as tilings, with a parallel production of the 
correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious- 
ness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a 
distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and 
paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here 
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by 
a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above 
an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small 
surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some 
vague and dim recollection of the general import of the vision, 
yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and 
images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the 
surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas ! 
without the after restoration of the latter. ..." See Andrew 
Lang's comment in LiltelVs Living Age, Vol. 206, p. 285. 

1. 5. Down to a sunless sea. " But what a grand flood is 
this, flowing down through measureless caverns to a sea with- 
out a sun ! I know no other sea equal to it, except Keats', 
in his Ode to a Nightingale; and none can surpass that." — 
Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, (Am. ed.), pp. 211-212. 

1. 36-40. A damsel, etc. See Talfourd, Memoirs of Charles 
Lamb (Phila., 1892), p. 80. 

1. 36-53. "In some of the smaller pieces, as the conclusion 

Medowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of 
beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous 
house of pleasure." — Pitrchas, His Pilgrimage, London, Fol. 1(326, 
Bk. IV., chap, xiii., p. 418. 

H 



98 NOTES 

of the Kubla Khan, for example, not only the lines by them- 
selves are musical, but the whole passage sounds all at once 
as an outburst or crash of harps in the still air of autumn. 
The verses seem as if played to the ear upon some unseen 
instrument; and. the poet's manner of reciting verse is similar. 
It is not rhetorical, but musical ; so very near recitative, that 
for anyone else to attempt it would be ridiculous ; and yet it 
is perfectly miraculous with what exquisite searching he elicits 
and makes sensible every particle of the meaning, not leaving 
a shadow of a shade of the feeling, the mood, the degree, 
untouched." — Quarterly Review, Vol. 52, p. 8. 

CHRISTABEL 

This poem was first published, with the following preface, in 
1816: 

" The first part of the following poem was written in the 
year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven, at Stowey, 
in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return 
from Germany, in the year one thousand eight hundred, at 
Keswick, Cumberland. Since the latter date, my poetic powers 
have been, till very lately, in a state of suspended animation. 
But as, in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole 
present to my mind, with the wholeness, no less than with the 
liveliness, of a vision, I trust that I shall be able to embody in 
verse the three parts yet to come, in the course of the present 
year. 

"It is probable, that if the poem had been finished at either 
of the former periods, or if even the first and second part had 
been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality 
would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. 
But for this, I have only my own indolence to blame. The 



NOTES 99 

dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding 
charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For 
there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold that 
every possible thought and image is traditional ; who have no 
notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, 
small as well as great ; and who would therefore charitably 
derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made 
in some other man's tank. 1 I am confident, however, that as 
far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets 
whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either 
in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the 
whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the 
charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit 
me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish 
Latin hexameters : 

Tis mine, and it is likewise yours ; 

But an if this will not do, 
Let it be mine, good friend, for I 

Am the poorer of the two. 

" I have only to add that the metre of the Christabel is not, 
properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its 
being founded on a new principle, — namely, that of counting in 
each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may 
vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be 

1 Tennyson's expression of the same thought is perhaps more 
familiar: " But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, 
editors of booklets, bookworms, index-hunters, or men of great 
memories and no imagination, who impute themselves to the poet, 
and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is forever pok- 
ing his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see 
what he can appropriate." — Letter to Mr. S. E. Dawson, November 
21, 1882. 



100 NOTES 

found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in 
number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere 
ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, 
in the nature of the imagery or passion. 11 

1. 1. 'Tis the middle of night, etc. "The circumstances 
with which the poem opens are admirably conceived. There is 
in all the images introduced a certain fearful stillness and 
ominous meaning, the effect of which can never be forgotten. 
The language, also, is so much in harmony with the rude era of 
the tale that it seems scarcely to have been written in the 
present age, as is indeed a wonderful proof of what genius can 
effect in defiance of unfavorable associations. Whoever has had 
his mind penetrated with the true expression of a Gothic building 
will find a similar impression conveyed by the vein of language 
employed in this legend. The manners, also, and forms of 
courtesy ascribed to the personages, are full of solemn grace." 
Blackwood 1 s Magazine, Vol. 6, p. 9. For suggestions as to 
the sources of the three scenes in Part I., — the meeting in the 
wood, the castle, and the bed-chamber, — see Brandl, Coleridge 
and the English Romantic Movement, pp. 210-213. 

1. 3. Tu-whit, etc. "An onomatopoeia which occurs in one 
of Shakespeare's best-known lyrics." — Traill. See Tenny- 
son's two songs to The Owl. 

1. 14. Is the night chilly and dark? Brandl observes that 
the style of this poem is characterized by " an accumulation of 
question and interjection. 1 ' 

1. 18. The moon is behind, etc. Dowden thinks a suggestion 
of the description may be found in Dorothy Wordsworth's 
Journal. See Knight's Life of W. Wordsworth, Vol. I., p. 134. 

1. 23. Christabel. On the origin of the name see Caine's 



NOTES 101 

Recollections of D. G. Bossetti, pp. 151-153. " With the most 
exquisite feeling for womanhood in its general features, he seems 
to have been incapable of drawing strongly the features of any 
individual woman. . . . Even Christabel is a figure somewhat 
faintly drawn, — a figure expressing indeed the beauty, inno- 
cence, and gentleness of maidenhood, but without any of the 
traits of a distinctive personality.''' — Dowden, New Studies 
in Literature, p. 321. 

I. 48. There is not wind, etc. Dowden refers again to 
Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. See Knight's Life of William 

Wordsworth, Vol. I., p. 141. 

II. 58-65. For the various readings to this passage, and 
others following, see notes to Campbell's edition. 

1. 113. That strove to be, etc. Like one's steps in a night- 
mare. 

1. 131. Lifted her up. "The lifting her over the sill seems 
to be something like the same superstition that we have in 
Scott's Eve of St. John : 

' But I had not had pow'r to come to thy bow'r, 
If thou had'st not charm'd me so.' " 

— C. B., Notes and Queries, First Series, Vol. I., p. 324. In 
Vol. II., p. 47, C. Forbes quotes from The Abbot: " 'Reverend 
father,' replied Magdalen, ' hast thou never heard that there are 
spirits powerful to rend the walls of a castle asunder when 
once admitted, which yet cannot enter the house unless they 
are invited, nay, dragged over the threshold ? Twice hath 
Roland Groeme been thus drawn into the household of Avenel 
by those who now hold the title. Let them look to the issue.' " 
See Tlie Abbot, chap. 15, ad finis, and note. 



102 NOTES 

I. 158. But when the lady passed, etc. " With what ex- 
quisite delicacy are all these hints of the true character of this 
stranger imagined — the difficulty of passing the threshold, 
the dread and incapacity of prayer, the moaning of the old 
mastiff in his sleep, the rekindling of the dying embers as 
she passes, the influence of the lamp k fastened to the angel's 
feet.' . . . After the notion of evil has once been suggested 
to the reader, the external beauty and great mildness of de- 
meanor ascribed to the stranger produce only the deeper 
feeling of terror, and they contrast, in a manner singularly 
impressive, with the small revelations which every now and 
then take place of what is concealed beneath them." — Black- 
wood' s Magazine, Vol. G, pp. 10-11. 

II. 175-183. The moon shines, etc. " Nowhere out of Keats' 
Eve of St. Agnes is there any 'interior' to match that of 
Christabel's chamber, done as it is in little more than half a 
dozen lines." — Traill, Coleridge, p. 54. 

1. 238. And lay down, etc. On the singular beauty of this 
line see Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (Am. ed. ), 
pp. (3-7. 

I. 252. Behold ! etc. There has been much speculation as 
to the sight revealed to Christabel. See Campbell's note ; 
Caine, Recollections of D. G. Bossetti, pp. 153-151 ; Dowden, 
New Studies in Literature, p. 339; Notes and Queries, First 
Series, Vol. I., p. 324. 

II. 408-426. Coleridge, in a letter to Poole, called these lines 
" the best and sweetest" he ever wrote. Rossetti thought that 
they were written separately and then fitted into the poem. 
See Pater, Appreciations, pp. 102-103 ; also Letters of S. T. Cole- 
ridge, Vol. II., p. 6 J9, note. 



NOTES 103 

1. 422. Like cliffs, etc. See Caine, Recollections of D. G. 
Bossetti, pp. 101-162, for some geological strictures on this line 
and lines 424, 426. 

I. 583. A snake's small eye, etc. See Brandl, Coleridge, 
etc., p. 214. "It is that description of the serpent-look of the 
witch's eyes which, on being read in a company at Lord Byron's, 
is said to have caused Shelley to faint." — Keed, Lectures on 
British Poets, Vol. II., p. 125. 

II. 605-603. And positively, etc. " We see how such a poet 
obtains his music. Such forms of melody can proceed only 
from the most beautiful inner spirit of sympathy and imagina- 
tion, lie sympathizes, in his universality, with antipathy 
itself. If Began or Goneril had been a young and handsome 
witch of the times of chivalry, and attuned her violence to 
craft, or betrayed it in venomous looks, she could not have 
beaten the soft-voiced, appalling spells, or sudden, snake-eyed 
glances of the lady Geraldine, — looks which the innocent 
Christabel, in her fascination, feels compelled to 'imitate.' 
. . . This is as exquisite in its knowledge of the fascinating 
tendencies of fear as it is in its description." — Leigh Hunt, 
Imagination and Fancy, pp. 205, 206. 

11. 653-677. Campbell thinks it " highly improbable that the 
lines were composed for Christabel. They were sent to Southey 
in a letter of May 6, 1801, and were therefore probably written 
about that time." In the letter to Southey these lines follow 
immediately after an expression of anxiety as to the little 
Hartley's health, and are in turn followed by a sentence which 
fully explains their import: 'A very metaphysical account of 
fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, and little varlets, 
etc." See Letters of S. T. Coleridge, Vol. I., pp. 355-356, for 
E. H. Coleridge's note on the passage. For another interpreta- 



104 NOTES 

tion of the passage see Notes and Queries, First Series, Vol. V., 
pp. 339-340. 

The Conclusion of Christabel. — Although Coleridge made 
many allusions in his letters and conversations to finishing the 
poem, nothing ever came of all his plans. In Gillman's Life 
of Coleridge, however, the following conclusion is reported 
(pp. 301-303) : 

'•The following relation was to have occupied a third and 
fourth canto, and to have closed the tale. Over the mountains 
the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, hastes with his disciple ; 
but in consequence of one of those inundations, supposed to be 
common to this country, the spot only where the castle once 
stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed away. He 
determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all that 
is passing, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Reap- 
pearing, however, she awaits the return of the bard, exciting in 
the meantime, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in 
the baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is 
described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the 
youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer person- 
ate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de 
Vaux. but changes her appearance to that of the accepted though 
absent lover of Christabel. Now ensues a courtship most dis-' 
tressing to Christabel, who feels, she knows not why, great 
disgust for her once favored knight, This coldness is very 
painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself 
of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her 
father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with this 
hated suitor. The real lover, returning, enters at this moment, 
and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign 
of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being, 



NOTES 105 

Geraldine, disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the 
mother's voice is heard, and to the exceeding great joy of the 
parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a 
reconciliation and explanation between the father and daugh- 
ter." See also Eossetti, Lives of Famous Poets, p. 250 ; Caine, 
Recollections of D. G. Rossetti, p. 154 ; Wordsworth's Prose 
Works, Vol. til, p. 427. 



INDEX 



A (= one), 86. 

abruptness in introducing details 
and incidents, 72. 

albatross, 70, 79, 81, 88. 

Ancient Mariner, conclusion of, 
95-96; grammatical notes, 74, 
79, 82; impossibility of illus- 
trating, 85 ; metre of, 78, 80, 81, 
86 ; moral of, 94-95 ; origin of, 
xviii-xix, 69-71; published in 
Lyrical Ballads, xix, 69; phi- 
losophy of, 88, 94-95 ; religion 
in, 81; sources of, 69-71, 74, 
77-78, 90, 90-91; Swinburne 
on, xxxiv; text, changes in, 
69 ; textual notes, 73, 76, 79, 80, 
83-84, 85, 89-90, 92, 93 ; Words- 
worth on, xxxiii. 

archaisms, use of, 78. 

association, use of, 86. 

bar, 85. 

bassoon, 76. 

Behold! her bosom, etc., 102. 

black lips baked, 82. 

Bowles' Sonnets, xi. 

Boyer, James, ix-x. 



Burnet, motto from, 69; transla- 
tion of motto, 71-72. 

Christabel, character of, 101; 
origin of name, 100-101. 

Christabel, conclusion of, 98, 
104-105 ; date, xxv, 98 ; ' inte- 
rior' of (lines 175-183), 102; 
interjection in, use of, 100; 
geology of, 103 ; lines 408-426, 
102; lines 656-677, 103-104; 
metre of, 99-100; music of, 
103; opening lines, 100; origi- 
nality of, 98-99; question in, 
use of, 100 ; text of, 101. 

clifts, 78. 

Coleridge, as critic, xii, xx, xxiii, 
xxxi; as journalist, xv, xxiv, 
xxx-xxxi; as lecturer, xv, 
xxiv; as man, xxix-xxx; as 
monologist, viii, xii, xxvi- 
xxviii, xxxiv, 74 ; as philoso- 
pher, viii, xi, xx, xxii-xxiv, 
xxxi; as poet, x, xi, xv, xvi- 
xx, xxii-xxiv, xxv, xxxii ; as 
preacher, ix, xv ; as theologian , 
xxxi ; as translator, xx-xxi ; 



107 



108 



INDEX 



and Lamb, viii, xxi ; and Poole, 
xxi; and Southey, xiii-xiv; 
and Wordsworth, xvi-xx, xxi, 
xxxii, 69-71 ; at Cambridge, 
xii-xiii ; at Christ's Hospital, 
vii-xii ; at Highgate, xxi, xxv- 
xxix ; birth, v ; boyish pas- 
times, aversion to, vi, vii, x ; 
childhood, vi-vii ; death, xxix ; 
decline of poetical powers, 
xxii-xxiii, 98 ; domestic troub- 
les, xv, xxi, xxix; enlistment 
in army, xiii ; financial straits, 
xiii, xiv-xvi, xxi ; from 1799- 
1816, xxi-xxii ; Germany, visit 
to, xx ; marriage, xiv; mental 
character, xxix ; opium, use of, 
xvi, xxi-xxii, xxv, 96; parent- 
age, v-vi; pension, xx, xxv- 
xxvi ; place in literature, xxx- 
xxxii ; precocity, vii-viii ; prose 
works, xxv; reading, early, 
vi-vii, viii, x, xi. 

contrast, use of, 76, 87. 

crazy go, Who now doth, 91. 

crime of Ancient Mariner, 69-70, 
79. 

cross-bow, 86. 

curses in literature, 86. 



death-fires, 81. 
Death in poetry, 84. 
description, indirect, 73. 
drifts, 78. 



I eftsoons, 74. 
ellipsis, rhetorical, 72. 
epithets, 74-75. 
eye, A snake's small, 103. 
eye, His glittering, 74. 

figures, use of, 81. 

furrow followed free, The, 80. 

geography, use of, 76, 77, 90. 
ghost, a blessed, 88. 
glosses, the, 69, 70, 72, 85, 87. 
gossameres, 83. 
g?*in, They for joy did, 82. 

Hermit, 93, 94. 

horrible, omission of, 69, 84-85. 

honey-dew, As soft as, 90. 

In ripple or in shade, 92. 
I pass, like night, 94. 
isolation, sense of, 75, 79. 
It is an ancient Mariner, 72. 
Ivy-tod, 93. 

Kubla Khan, date, xxv, 96; 
music of, 97-98 ; origin of, 90- 
97 ; source of, 96. 

language superior to painting 

and sculpture, 89. 
lay down in her loveliness, And, 

102. 
Lifted her up, 101. 
lightning, description of, 89. 
living life, 90. 



INDEX 



109 



loon, 74. 

Lyrical Ballads, xvii-xx, xxxiii, 
69. 

minstrelsy, 76. 
monosyllables, use of, 75. 

Night-mare, 85. 
Nodding their heads, 76. 
numbers, use of, 72-73. 

ocean green, 91. 
one of three, 72-73. 
or ever, 86. 

painting, limitation of, 81, 89. 
pantisocracy, xiv. 
Pilot shrieked, 93. 
poetry, x, xviii-xix, xxxii. 

reading, suggestions on expres- 

sive, 79, 80, 81, 89. 
repetition, use of, 76. 

sculpture, limitation of, 89. 
shapes, Full many, 93. 
shroud, 79. 
silly, 88. 



sky -lark, 89. 

slave, Still as a s. be/ore his lord, 

90. 
Sleep, 88. 

suggestion, use of, 85. 
sunless sea, Down to a, 97. 
supernatural, use of, 73-74, 77, 

82-83, 87-88, 89, 91, 94, 95-96, 

101, 102. 
surprise, use of, 76. 
sioound, 78. 

TJiat strove to be, and were not, 

fast, 101. 
Thorough, 78. 
thunder-fit, 78. 
Tu-whit, etc., 100. 

unreal, vividness of the, 73-74. 

vespers, 79. 

Wedding-Guest, 74, 79. 
well-a-day, 81. 

wist, 82. 

Within the nether tip, 85-86. 

words, economy in use of, 75. 



Exercises in Rhetoric and English 
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